Matthew McConaughey

Matthew McConaughey
Birth name	Matthew David McConaughey
Born	November 4 1969 (age 38) Uvalde, Texas, United States

Matthew David McConaughey (pronounced "ma-KON-a-hay") (born November 4, 1969) is an American actor. After a series of minor roles in the early 1990s (including his breakout role in Dazed and Confused, director Richard Linklater's second feature film), he came to fame after starring in several successful films, including A Time to Kill and U-571. He is known for having played the leading man in several hit romantic comedies, including The Wedding Planner (2001), How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (2003) and Failure to Launch (2006).

Biography

Early life

McConaughey, the youngest of three boys, son of a gas station owner who ran an oil pipe supply business, and a mother who was a substitute school teacher, was born in Uvalde, Texas; and has Irish ancestry.^[1] McConaughey had what he describes as a conservative Christian upbringing.^[2] His late father, James Donald McConaughey, and his mother, Mary Kathlene "Kay" McCabe, divorced and re-married each other several times, in what McConaughey describes as a "loving, but unstable relationship".^[3]

McConaughey moved to Longview, Texas in 1980 and graduated from Longview High School in 1988, where he was voted the "Most Handsome".^[4] Matthew lived for a year in Warnervale, NSW, Australia as a Rotary exchange student.^[5] He had relative academic success in high school, and went on to college. He studied film direction at the University of Texas at Austin and was a member of Delta Tau Delta Fraternity, graduating in 1993.

As admitted on "Monday Night Football", he is a die-hard Washington Redskins fan.

Career

McConaughey began his acting career in 1991, appearing in student films and television commercials in Texas before being cast in his first role in Richard Linklater's film Dazed and Confused (1993), after meeting casting director Don Phillips at a bar near the University of Texas at Austin. After appearing in some additional small parts in Angels in the Outfield, Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation, Boys on the Side, and the television series Unsolved Mysteries, McConaughey's big break came as the lawyer "Jake Brigance" in the 1996 film A Time to Kill, based on the John Grisham novel of the same name. In 1997, McConaughey won an MTV Movie Award for best breakthrough performance for the role. He has also twice been nominated for a Blockbuster Entertainment Award.

McConaughey gained renown and was cast in leading roles in many more movies: Contact, Amistad, The Newton Boys, Edtv, and U-571. By the early 2000s, he was frequently cast in romantic comedies, including The Wedding Planner and How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, both of which were successful at the box office. During this period, he appeared as a firefighter in the low-budget film Tiptoes, opposite Kate Beckinsale, in Two For The Money as a protege to Al PacinoĘ's gambling mogul, and in Frailty, cast against type as a serial killer, opposite Bill Paxton.

McConaughey starred in the feature film Sahara (budgeted at $130 million), along with Steve Zahn and Penélope Cruz. Prior to the release of the movie, he promoted it by repeating some trips he took in the late 1990s, including sailing down the Amazon River and trekking to Mali. In 2005, People magazine named him their "Sexiest Man Alive". In 2006, he co-starred with Sarah Jessica Parker in the romantic comedy Failure to Launch, which was reasonably successful at the box office.

McConaughey also provided voice work for an ad campaign of the Peace Corps in late 2006.

Personal life

On October 25, 1999, McConaughey was arrested at his home in Austin, Texas; the charges included possession of marijuana and resisting arrest. The police were responding at 2:37 a.m. to a disturbance call after a neighbor complained of loud music from the house next-door. They arrived to "easily hear very loud music," bongo drum playing and clapping coming from McConaughey's residence. According to official police reports, McConaughey was found dancing around naked and playing bongo drums with a friend, actor Cole Hauser, a co-actor in Dazed and Confused (1993).^[6] The drug charges were dropped, but McConaughey pled guilty for violating the city's noise ordinance and paid a USD $50 fine.

McConaughey seems to have a concern for the humane treatment of animals as well as a knack for getting himself involved in unusual situations with them. In 2006 in Sherman Oaks, California, he reportedly snatched a cat away from two youths who had doused the animal in hairspray and were attempting to light it on fire.^[7] Earlier, in 2005, the actor is alleged to have frightened away a coyote that was threatening a mother and her child in a Los Angeles park.^[8] An Oprah Winfrey episode from that same year also showed McConaughey participating in a rescue of various pets, including cats, dogs and hamsters, that were stranded after the flooding of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina.^[9]

An avid University of Texas at Austin football fan, McConaughey is often seen at Longhorn games. In addition to his home in Austin, he also owns a 1,600 acre ranch in Texas. He has dated actresses Sandra Bullock, Ashley Judd, and more recently Penelope Cruz. The two had been together since 2004, following Cruz's break-up with Tom Cruise. Having split with Cruz in April of 2006, McConaughey is currently enjoying single life with his friends, and has been seen with a number of different women at clubs around the United States, but most notably Kaufman nurse, Denise Black. The very fit McConaughey spent much of the summer of 2006 enjoying healthy hobbies such as running, surfing, swimming, and biking, as documented frequently by the paparazzi.

McConaughey's personal life is the subject of many media reports. In July 2006, some of his real-life foibles were documented via "McConaughey's Lost Weekend.", a blog with photographs of a "three-day bender in Costa Rica." In the November 2006 issue of Details magazine, McConaughey flippantly responded to growing rumors that he and cyclist Lance Armstrong were involved in a gay relationship with the comment, "We tried it. Wasn't for us."^{[citation needed]} McConaughey has been hailed as one of the industry's hottest young leading men, inspiring comparisons to actor Paul Newman and he was named as People magazine's "Sexiest Man Alive" for 2005. "Extra, NBC" reported in 2006 that McConaughey admits to wearing no underwear, and says he doesn't use cologne or deodorant, because he doesn't want to smell like someone else. He says, "People say I ought to start wearing it."^[10]

Matthew's production company, j.k. livin, is currently in development on projects with Warner Bros., Universal, Paramount and Imagine Entertainment and can most recently be seen in the football drama We Are Marshall.

On December 19th, 2006, eBay's homepage featured Matthew's picture and named an auction of autographed items he donated to raise money for charity as the "It" of the day.

He is supposedly in line to star as Thomas Magnum in the 2008 movie Magnum, P.I.^[11]

Selected filmography

Footnotes

Wikipedia information about Matthew McConaughey This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Matthew McConaughey". It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer). Help contribute to Americola and edit this article.