http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common ... 02,00.html
Actor Chris Penn dead
From correspondents in Los Angeles
25jan06
US actor Chris Penn, younger brother of Oscar-winner Sean Penn, has died in at an apartment near the Pacific Ocean in the Los Angeles suburb of Santa Monica.
No cause of death was immediately determined but there was no signs of foul play, police sources said. A family spokeswoman confirmed the death and said the Penn family "would appreciate the media's respect of their privacy during this difficult time".
Penn, 43, starred in dozens of films.
He played baby-faced criminal Nice Guy Eddie Cabot in director Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs and starred along with his brother in the 1986 film At Close Range. He also played Willard Hewitt in Footloose in 1984.
Recently, Penn voiced Officer Eddie Pulaski in the video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
Penn's body was found inside the four-storey apartment complex after police were called by someone from within the building, police Lieutenant Frank Fabrega said.
An autopsy would be conducted to determine the cause of death, authorities said.
Penn's latest film, The Darwin Awards, was scheduled to premiere tomorrow at the Sundance Film Festival.
Chris Penn dead
-
noiseradio
- Posts: 2295
- Joined: Tue Jun 03, 2003 12:04 pm
- Location: Dallas, TX
- Contact:
He was definitely great in "Reservoir Dogs" and other movies. However, in hindsight, I've heard things that were worrisome, though I can't remember precisely where (possibly in the reality-verse talking with El Vez, or maybe elsewhere) he'd been cut out of several films or been strangely not-good in several movies where he did make the cut. He certainly seemed to be putting on a weight in an unusually fast way for an actor.
http://www.forwardtoyesterday.com -- Where "hopelessly dated" is a compliment!
-
spooky girlfriend
- Site Admin
- Posts: 3007
- Joined: Mon Jun 02, 2003 5:19 pm
- Location: Huntsville, Alabama
- Contact:
I read on the CNN webpage this morning that his cause of death is still undetermined after the autopsy. I know what that feels like all too well since my brother had two autopsies and they still didn't come up with a cause of death. Odd that this would make the news today when my brother would have turned 36.
I hope they find the cause of death for Penn. It's really hard to not have closure on exactly why someone died.
I hope they find the cause of death for Penn. It's really hard to not have closure on exactly why someone died.
-
martinfoyle
- Posts: 2502
- Joined: Tue Jun 03, 2003 5:24 pm
- Location: Dublin, Ireland
- Contact:
The most recent appearance I saw of him was that guest spot on L&O Criminal Intent last spring and, while the performance was great, I was shocked by the weight of him. Apparently he was 300 Ibs at death. I remember reading an interview with him done while he was doing some work on a UK film recently and the journalist was appalled to see him have a double helping of the death-on-a-plate breakfast special at the greasy spoon where they were talking. That's what probably killed him, a warning shot to all of us around his age. A terrible waste of talent.
-
spooky girlfriend
- Site Admin
- Posts: 3007
- Joined: Mon Jun 02, 2003 5:19 pm
- Location: Huntsville, Alabama
- Contact:
-
bambooneedle
- Posts: 4533
- Joined: Tue Jun 03, 2003 4:02 pm
- Location: a few thousand miles south east of Zanzibar
Chris Farley as well. He died at a mere 33, same as John Belushi.spooky girlfriend wrote:Why do we have to lose so many good actors to just being too heavy and not taking care of themselves? It was kind of the same when John Candy died. Not an oscar winning actor, but funny as hell most of the time.
-
noiseradio
- Posts: 2295
- Joined: Tue Jun 03, 2003 12:04 pm
- Location: Dallas, TX
- Contact:
http://news.independent.co.uk/people/ob ... 341013.ece
Chris Penn
Compelling supporting actor
Published: 26 January 2006
Christopher Penn, actor: born Los Angeles 10 October 1965; (one daughter deceased); died Santa Monica, California 24 January 2006.
Chris Penn was destined even in death to remain overshadowed by his Oscar-winning sibling - "Sean Penn's Brother Found Dead," the media reported after his body was found in his apartment in Santa Monica, California on Tuesday.
But, despite uncertain beginnings and a period of derailment in the 1980s, the youngest Penn brother had spent more than a decade carving for himself a distinctive career that in no way overlapped with his brother's more earnest ventures. Which is not to say that Chris Penn wasn't a serious actor prized by notable directors: Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Altman, Quentin Tarantino and Abel Ferrara were among those who got the sour, sleazy best out of him. Indeed, it was his performance as the uncouth gangster Nice Guy Eddie in Tarantino's 1993 début Reservoir Dogs that put Penn back on track.
He was the youngest of three sons born to the director Leo Penn and the actress Eileen Ryan. Five years junior to Sean, and seven years younger than Michael, who was to become a singer-songwriter, Christopher Penn was raised in Los Angeles and gained small film and television parts while still a child.
His first significant film role came at the age of 16 in Coppola's expressionistic teen drama Rumble Fish (1983), alongside Matt Dillon and Nicolas Cage. This was followed by All the Right Moves (1983), an early vehicle for Tom Cruise. Immediately, though, it was clear that Penn was less lacquered than these co-stars, who had been bracketed together by the media under the term "Brat Pack", along with the likes of Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy and Kevin Bacon. Penn proved his lack of vanity playing Bacon's ungainly best friend in Footloose.
Off-screen, he could be just as much of a misfit, having been expelled from school at 15. "They wanted me to leave and I wanted to leave too," he said later. Competing with Sean also made the early stages of his acting career rather fraught, and brought an intriguing frisson to their appearance together in the 1986 thriller At Close Range (in which their mother also starred). "I was in Sean's shadow," remarked Chris Penn. "I felt I had to do what I could to be different. It was unhealthy."
That desire to differentiate himself led to years of self-destructiveness. While Sean Penn developed and then rejected a bad-boy image that seemed to nourish his acting, his kid brother lost all grip on his career. He became addicted to cocaine, and was a regular fixture in Los Angeles bar brawls in the mid-1980s; the death of his two-day-old daughter, born prematurely, only increased his torment. "[Cocaine] was ruining my career," he admitted, "because with it came irresponsibility, a bad attitude, irrational behaviour and bad decisions."
It looked like the end of the story - actors tend not to bounce back from movies as poor as Return from the River Kwai (1989). But Chris Penn's luck was in. He auditioned for Reservoir Dogs, a witty and claustrophobic thriller focusing on the fall-out from a bungled heist:
I read the script and thought, "All I have to do is get this one movie." I knew that part would change everything.
That was quite an understatement. His turn as Nice Guy Eddie - a porcine bullyboy whose garish shell-suit seemed to herald his sociopathic tendencies - rescued him from obscurity. But it did more than that, securing him a place in the public consciousness. From that moment on, any appearance by Penn, even in the lighter roles provided by the Tarantino-scripted True Romance (1993) or Rush Hour (1998), gave viewers a pre-emptive chill.
He was compelling, untrustworthy and not without a strange sliver of tenderness. Amongst the brutish ensemble cast of Reservoir Dogs, ripe with violence and drunk on testosterone, he proved himself the most fearsome.
Although Reservoir Dogs is the movie for which Penn will be remembered, he was arguably even better in Altman's Short Cuts (1993) and Ferrara's The Funeral (1996). In the former, he was terrifying and heartbreaking as an inarticulate pool-cleaner who rages mutely over his wife's career as a phone-sex worker. Meanwhile, in The Funeral, Ferrara gave the actor yet another plum opportunity to explore the ugliest recesses of masculinity, as one of three criminal brothers. In the eccentric company of Christopher Walken and Vincent Gallo, it would take a lot to stand out. But it is the image of a red-faced, blistering Penn haranguing his wife, played by Isabella Rossellini, that dominates.
Not every part proved such a stretch: Penn's work in Stealing Harvard (2002) and Starsky and Hutch (2004) can't have been much more demanding than the voiceover work he provided for the computer game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. He had, though, reversed his slide into anonymity, to establish himself as one of the most forceful, if least endearing, supporting actors in Hollywood.
Ryan Gilbey
Chris Penn
Compelling supporting actor
Published: 26 January 2006
Christopher Penn, actor: born Los Angeles 10 October 1965; (one daughter deceased); died Santa Monica, California 24 January 2006.
Chris Penn was destined even in death to remain overshadowed by his Oscar-winning sibling - "Sean Penn's Brother Found Dead," the media reported after his body was found in his apartment in Santa Monica, California on Tuesday.
But, despite uncertain beginnings and a period of derailment in the 1980s, the youngest Penn brother had spent more than a decade carving for himself a distinctive career that in no way overlapped with his brother's more earnest ventures. Which is not to say that Chris Penn wasn't a serious actor prized by notable directors: Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Altman, Quentin Tarantino and Abel Ferrara were among those who got the sour, sleazy best out of him. Indeed, it was his performance as the uncouth gangster Nice Guy Eddie in Tarantino's 1993 début Reservoir Dogs that put Penn back on track.
He was the youngest of three sons born to the director Leo Penn and the actress Eileen Ryan. Five years junior to Sean, and seven years younger than Michael, who was to become a singer-songwriter, Christopher Penn was raised in Los Angeles and gained small film and television parts while still a child.
His first significant film role came at the age of 16 in Coppola's expressionistic teen drama Rumble Fish (1983), alongside Matt Dillon and Nicolas Cage. This was followed by All the Right Moves (1983), an early vehicle for Tom Cruise. Immediately, though, it was clear that Penn was less lacquered than these co-stars, who had been bracketed together by the media under the term "Brat Pack", along with the likes of Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy and Kevin Bacon. Penn proved his lack of vanity playing Bacon's ungainly best friend in Footloose.
Off-screen, he could be just as much of a misfit, having been expelled from school at 15. "They wanted me to leave and I wanted to leave too," he said later. Competing with Sean also made the early stages of his acting career rather fraught, and brought an intriguing frisson to their appearance together in the 1986 thriller At Close Range (in which their mother also starred). "I was in Sean's shadow," remarked Chris Penn. "I felt I had to do what I could to be different. It was unhealthy."
That desire to differentiate himself led to years of self-destructiveness. While Sean Penn developed and then rejected a bad-boy image that seemed to nourish his acting, his kid brother lost all grip on his career. He became addicted to cocaine, and was a regular fixture in Los Angeles bar brawls in the mid-1980s; the death of his two-day-old daughter, born prematurely, only increased his torment. "[Cocaine] was ruining my career," he admitted, "because with it came irresponsibility, a bad attitude, irrational behaviour and bad decisions."
It looked like the end of the story - actors tend not to bounce back from movies as poor as Return from the River Kwai (1989). But Chris Penn's luck was in. He auditioned for Reservoir Dogs, a witty and claustrophobic thriller focusing on the fall-out from a bungled heist:
I read the script and thought, "All I have to do is get this one movie." I knew that part would change everything.
That was quite an understatement. His turn as Nice Guy Eddie - a porcine bullyboy whose garish shell-suit seemed to herald his sociopathic tendencies - rescued him from obscurity. But it did more than that, securing him a place in the public consciousness. From that moment on, any appearance by Penn, even in the lighter roles provided by the Tarantino-scripted True Romance (1993) or Rush Hour (1998), gave viewers a pre-emptive chill.
He was compelling, untrustworthy and not without a strange sliver of tenderness. Amongst the brutish ensemble cast of Reservoir Dogs, ripe with violence and drunk on testosterone, he proved himself the most fearsome.
Although Reservoir Dogs is the movie for which Penn will be remembered, he was arguably even better in Altman's Short Cuts (1993) and Ferrara's The Funeral (1996). In the former, he was terrifying and heartbreaking as an inarticulate pool-cleaner who rages mutely over his wife's career as a phone-sex worker. Meanwhile, in The Funeral, Ferrara gave the actor yet another plum opportunity to explore the ugliest recesses of masculinity, as one of three criminal brothers. In the eccentric company of Christopher Walken and Vincent Gallo, it would take a lot to stand out. But it is the image of a red-faced, blistering Penn haranguing his wife, played by Isabella Rossellini, that dominates.
Not every part proved such a stretch: Penn's work in Stealing Harvard (2002) and Starsky and Hutch (2004) can't have been much more demanding than the voiceover work he provided for the computer game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. He had, though, reversed his slide into anonymity, to establish himself as one of the most forceful, if least endearing, supporting actors in Hollywood.
Ryan Gilbey
-
bambooneedle
- Posts: 4533
- Joined: Tue Jun 03, 2003 4:02 pm
- Location: a few thousand miles south east of Zanzibar
.-
Fishfinger king
- Posts: 621
- Joined: Sat Feb 05, 2005 6:41 am
- Location: On the border
-
bambooneedle
- Posts: 4533
- Joined: Tue Jun 03, 2003 4:02 pm
- Location: a few thousand miles south east of Zanzibar