Jeff Bridges

Jeffrey Leon Bridges

Born: December 4, 1949 [Los Angeles,California, U.S.]

Occupation: Actor | Filmproducer | Singer

Years active: From 1951

Spouse: Susan Geston ​(m. 1977)

Jeffrey Leon Bridges (born December 4, 1949) is an American actor. Known for his versatility, he has received various accolades throughout his career spanning over seven decades, including an Academy Award and two Golden Globe Awards. Critic Pauline Kael wrote that Bridges "may be the most natural and least self-conscious screen actor that has ever lived."

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Career

Bridges comes from a prominent acting family and appeared on the television series Sea Hunt (1958–1960) alongside his father, Lloyd Bridges, and brother, Beau Bridges.

He received the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance as an alcoholic singer in the 2009 film Crazy Heart. Other Oscar-nominated roles include The Last Picture Show (1971), Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974), Starman (1984), The Contender (2000), True Grit (2010), and Hell or High Water (2016). Bridges has also starred in other roles such as The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989), The Fisher King (1991), The Big Lebowski (1998) and Bad Times at the El Royale (2018), along with the commercially successful films King Kong (1976), Tron (1982), Iron Man (2008), and Tron: Legacy (2010).

In 2022, he returned to television for a role as a former CIA operative in The Old Man.

Philanthropy

In 1984, Bridges and other entertainment industry leaders founded the End Hunger Network aimed at encouraging, stimulating and supporting action to end childhood hunger. He supported President Obama's initiative to End Childhood Hunger by 2015.

In November 2010, Bridges became spokesman for the No Kid Hungry campaign of the organization Share our Strength. Its goal is to present and undertake a state-by-state strategy to end childhood hunger in the United States by 2015. Bridges also supports environmental causes and organizations such as the Amazon Conservation Team.

Other work

Writing

In 2013, Bridges wrote The Dude and the Zen Master with Bernie Glassman. Bridges found himself at a party with Glassman and Ram Dass and their conversation led to discussing the parallels between "The Dude" from The Big Lebowski and Zen Buddhism. The book was formed from what has been described as a "transcript of a five-day 'hang' on a Montana ranch."

Photography

Bridges has been an amateur photographer since high school. He began taking photographs on film sets during Starman at the suggestion of co-star Karen Allen in 1984, with his favorite camera, a Widelux F8 that his wife bought him. He published many of these photographs online and in a 2003 book entitled Pictures: Photographs by Jeff Bridges. In 2013, he received an Infinity Award for his photos from the International Center of Photography in New York. A follow-up book, Jeff Bridges: Pictures Volume Two, was published in 2019.