Aug 16, 1960

Malibu, California, USA

After 19-year-old Timothy Hutton won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for
his role in the powerful family drama Ordinary People (1980), he spent
the rest of the decade and most of the '90s playing sensitive characters
in offbeat, intellectually oriented films, though he also occasionally
got to play villains. Hutton was primarily raised in Berkeley, CA, by his
mother as she and his father, actor Jim Hutton, best known for playing
Ellery Queen in the 1960s, divorced. Young Hutton gained earl... ... (read more...) y acting
experience in high school and during a summer vacation, toured the
country with his father in a road show production of +Harvey. Hutton
moved to Southern California to live with his dad and break into movies.
During his early years, Hutton appeared in television movies such as And
Baby Makes Six (1979) and the hard-hitting Friendly Fire (1979). Robert
Redford's directorial debut, Ordinary People, was Hutton's feature-film
debut. In part, the realism of Hutton's wrenching portrayal of the
anguished teen who blames himself for his brother's death was fueled by
his grief over his father's recent death from cancer. Hutton was the
youngest actor to win in the Best Supporting Actor category. Despite his
early promise, Hutton remains a well-respected but not terribly
high-ranking star. In part it could be a backlash from Ordinary People,
for Hutton was so good at playing the tormented young man that he was
relegated to playing similarly troubled youths, though he also
occasionally appeared in comedies, sci fi, and other genres. Roles in
Taps (1981) and Turk 182 showed that, given the chance, Hutton could
indeed expand the boundries of troubled youth niche to compelling
results, and though his roles in the following decade weren't always in
A-list features, Hutton did impress in such high profile releases as Q &
A (1990), The Dark Half (1993), French Kiss (1995) and The General's
Daughter (1999). As a general ruke Hutton would frequently avoid
mainstream films in favor of smaller roles as deeper characters in such
offbeat fare as City of Industry (1997) and Deterrence (1999), though the
new millennuim did find him stepping back into the spotlight somewhat
with the release of John Sayles' Sunshine State and the Steven King
adaptation Secret Window - which found him cast opposite Hollywood
heavyweight Johnny Depp. Of course having appeared in the acclaimed
thriller The Dark Half this wasn't Hutton's first foray into the King's
twisted universe, and in 2004 Hutton would continue to keep audiences'
pulses pounding with a role as a college professor who discovers a record
of his murder five days before it occurs in 5 Days to Midnight (2004).