Christopher Walken Biography

Eclectic, Academy Award-winning actor Christopher Walken is known for a wide array of screen roles, from ‘The Deer Hunter’ and ‘A View to a Kill’ to ‘Hairspray’ and ‘Peter Pan,’ also having hosted ‘Saturday Night Live’ multiple times and serving as a music video icon.

Actor Christopher Walken was born in Queens, New York, in 1943. Walken began working in the theater in his late teens, and by the early 1970s he had begun working in film. His breakthrough part came with Woody Allen's Annie Hall (1977), and he went on to win an Academy Award for his role in 1978's The Deerhunter, cultivating a full body of work in the '80s. In 1991, he gained his first Emmy Award nomination for his work on Sarah, Plain and Tall. A revered thespian who's known to work constantly, Walken has taken on a variety of projects that include everything from the Steven Spielberg drama Catch Me If You Can (for which he earned another Oscar nomination) to the music video for Fatboy Slim's "Weapon of Choice."