Paul Giamatti

Paul Edward Valentine Giamatti (born June 6, 1967) is an American actor.

Giamatti was born and raised in New Haven, Connecticut. His father, A. Bartlett Giamatti, was a Yale University professor who later became president of the university and commissioner of Major League Baseball. His mother, Toni Smith, was a homemaker and English teacher who taught at Hopkins School and had also previously acted. Giamatti's mother was Irish American; his paternal grandfather, Valentine Giamatti, was an Italian American, of parentage from Telese, and his paternal grandmother was Mary Claybaugh Walton, whose ancestors lived in the United States. He is descended from Massachusetts Governor Thomas Dudley.

Giamatti has a brother, Marcus, who is also an actor. Giamatti attended The Foote School, then the elite boarding school Choate Rosemary Hall. He attended Yale University, where he was active in the undergraduate theater scene and worked alongside actors Ron Livingston and Edward Norton, who were also Yale students. He graduated from Yale in 1989 with a bachelor's degree in English. He went on to earn a Master's degree in Fine Arts from the Yale School of Drama. He performed in numerous theatrical productions (including Broadway) before appearing in some small television and film roles in the early 1990s. In Giamatti's junior year at Yale he was "tapped" to enter Yale's elite and clandestine Skull and Bones secret society.

Giamatti's first high profile role was in the film adaptation of Howard Stern's Private Parts as Kenny "Pig Vomit" Rushton, Stern's antagonistic program director at WNBC. Stern praised Giamatti's performance often on his radio program, calling for him to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

Giamatti has commented on the fact that he often plays Jewish characters, but is almost never cast in Italian American roles.

The Brooklyn Academy of Music asked Giamatti, its "2007 BAM Cinema Club Chair", to pick films for an eight-movie series called "Paul Giamatti Selects" and shown at the Academy in August and September 2007. His selections indicated a taste for paranoia and "the darkest of dark comedy", according to a writer for The New York Times. Giamatti chose: Frenzy, Dr. Strangelove, Brewster McCloud, The Big Clock, The Seventh Victim, Dawn of the Dead (1978 version), Seconds, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978 version).

Giamatti's most acclaimed performances have been in lead roles in American Splendor (2003) and Sideways (2004). He was nominated for a Golden Globe and won an Independent Spirit Award for the latter. Giamatti received his first nomination for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 2005 for his role in Cinderella Man. He was also nominated for a Golden Globe and won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Supporting Actor - Motion Picture for the film. However, George Clooney won both the Golden Globe and the Academy Award for Syriana. He has been nominated for 38 separate awards between 2001 and 2008, and has won 25 of them. All of his nominations except one were for American Splendor, Sideways, Cinderella Man, or John Adams; the exception was a Blockbuster Entertainment Award nomination for Big Momma's House.

A resident of the Brooklyn Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, Giamatti has been married to Elizabeth Giamatti since 1997 and they have a son, Samuel, born in 2001. In a 2006 interview with totalfilm.com, he answers the question: Do you get the big star treatment at home now? "No, no. My wife treats me worse now. She has no tolerance for that sort of behaviour! She’s Jewish and my son will probably be raised Jewish. I’m an atheist, so I’m waiting for my time to step in and tell him how things really are but I’ll do that when he’s a teenager. I figure he’ll be ripe for atheism when he’s a teenager." He has proclaimed that he is still a New Haven boy, and upon his death would like to be interred in New Haven's Grove Street Cemetery, among signers of the Declaration of Independence but more importantly near his father.