Spanish actor, Javier Bardem was born 1 March 1969 in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria in the Canary Islands (Spain). Bardem was raised Roman Catholic by his grandmother and played rugby for the underage Spanish National Team. He comes from a long line of filmmakers and actors who have been working since the earliest days of Spanish cinema; he is the grandson of actors Rafael Bardem and Matilde Muñoz Sampedro, and the nephew of screenwriter and director Juan Antonio Bardem. Both his older brother and older sister, Carlos and Mónica Bardem, are actors. At age six, Bardem appeared in his first feature El Pícaro (The Scoundrel). Though he grew up in a family full of actors, Bardem didn't see himself going into the family business. In actuality painting was his first love. He went on to study painting for four years at Madrid’s 'Escuela de Artes y Oficios'. In need of money he took acting jobs to support his painting. Bardem starred in his second major motion picture, The Ages of Lulu, when he was 20. He was propelled to fame in 1992 with his role as a potential underwear model and would-be bullfighter in Jamón, jamón, which also starred a teenage Penélope Cruz. Bardem's talent did not go unnoticed in the English-speaking world. In 1997, John Malkovich was the first to approach the 27-year-old for a lead role in English, but Bardem turned down the offer due to his English being poor. His first English language speaking role came in 1997 with director Alex de la Iglesia's Perdita Durango, playing a santeria-practicing bank robber. After starring in roughly two dozen films in his native country, he gained international recognition in Julian Schnabel's Before Night Falls in 2000, portraying Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for the role, the first time for a Spaniard. With a better grasp of the English language, Bardem starred in John Malkovich's directorial debut, The Dancer Upstairs (2002).  Bardem won the Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival for his role in 2004's Mar Adentro, released in the United States as The Sea Inside, in which he portrayed the quadriplegic turned assisted suicide activist Ramón Sampedro. He made his Hollywood debut in a brief appearance as a crime lord who summons Tom Cruise's hitman in the crime drama Collateral. In 2007, Bardem acted in two film adaptations: the Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men, and the adaptation of the Colombian novel Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez. In No Country for Old Men, he played a sociopathic assassin, Anton Chigurh. For that role, he became the first Spaniard to win an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He also won a Golden Globe Award and Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Award for Best Supporting Actor, the Critics' Choice Award for Best Supporting Actor, and the 2008 British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Award for Best Supporting Actor. Bardem's rendition of Chigurh's trademark phrase, "Call it, friendo," was named Top HollyWORDIE of 2007 in the annual survey by the Global Language Monitor. Chigurh was named #26 in Entertainment Weekly magazine's 2008 "50 Most Vile Villains in Movie History" list. He went on to star alongside Penelope Cruz and Scarlett Johansson in Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008). In 2010 he starred alongside Julia Roberts in the film Eat Pray Love. Also in 2010, he was awarded Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival for his performance in Biutiful directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, who specifically wrote the film with Bardem in mind. After being overlooked by the Globes and SAG, Bardem was the unexpected Oscar nominee on 25 January 2011, becoming the first all Spanish-language Best Actor nominee ever. He won his 5th Goya Award, for Best Actor in Buitiful, dedicating the win to his wife, Penelope Cruz, and newborn son. The February issue of British GQ chose Bardem as its 2011 top best-dressed man internationally. Most recently, Bardem is scheduled to appear in a 2011 episode of the American TV musical sitcom Glee and in the fall of 2010, Bardem began production for the untitled sixth feature by Terrence Malick.