Matt Damon is an American actor, film producer, philanthropist and screenwriter.
His full name is Matthew Paige Damon.
He was born on October 8, 1970, in Boston, Massachusetts.
His father, Kent Damon, was a stockbroker realtor and tax preparer, and his mother, Nancy Carlsson-Paige was an early childhood education professor at Lesley University.
His father has English and Scottish ancestry, and his mother is of five-eighths Finnish and three-eighths Swedish descent.
Matt has an older brother named Kyle who is now a sculptor.
The family lived in Newton until his parents divorced in 1973, when Damon and his brother moved with his mother to Cambridge.
Damon attended Cambridge Rindge and Latin School and he performed in a number of theater productions during his time there.
Damon attended Harvard University as an English major. He left before receiving his degree to take a lead role in the film Geronimo: An American Legend (1993).
Up next for Matt was a role as a soldier who had problems with drug-addiction in 1996’s Courage Under Fire, for which he lost 18 kilograms (18 kg) in 100 days on a self-prescribed diet and fitness regimen. Courage Under Fire gained him critical notice, when The Washington Post labeled his performance “impressive”.
Courage Under Fire attracted the attention of director Francis Ford Coppola, who cast Damon as a novice lawyer opposite Danny DeVito in The Rainmaker (1997).
As Damon’s acting career met with success, he also pursued screenwriting. With longtime friend Ben Affleck, he developed the script for Good Will Hunting (1997). The film based on a one act play Damon had submitted for a course at Harvard — centres on a troubled but brilliant high-school dropout from Boston. The coauthors persuaded Miramax to let them star in the movie alongside veteran actor Robin Williams. The film garnered nine Oscar nominations, including best actor for Damon. In 1998, at age 27, he won (with Affleck) the Academy Award for best original screenplay.
In the year 1998, Matt played the title role in Steven Spielberg’s film, Saving Private Ryan (1998), which was one of the most acclaimed films in that year.
Also in 1998, he starred as an earnest law student and reformed poker player in Rounders (1998), starring opposite Edward Norton and John Malkovich.
Then he portrayed Patricia Highsmith’s antihero Tom Ripley in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), in which “Damon outstandingly conveys his character’s slide from innocent enthusiasm into cold calculation”, according to Variety magazine.
He played a fallen angel who discusses pop culture as intellectual subject matter with Affleck in Dogma (1999).
Matt lent his voice to the animated movie, Titan A.E. (2000) in the year 2000, which earned mixed reviews from the public. He also starred in two other movies, All the Pretty Horses (2000) and the golf comedy-drama, The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000), starring alongside Will Smith.
He co-starred as thief Linus Caldwell in Steven Soderbergh’s 2001 film Ocean’s Eleven (2001) and its two sequels, Ocean’s Twelve (2004) and Ocean’s Thirteen (2007).
In the Jason Bourne series — The Bourne Identity (2002), The Bourne Supremacy (2004), The Bourne Ultimatum (2007), and Jason Bourne (2016) — Damon portrayed an amnesiac U.S.- trained assassin trying to unravel the secrets of his past. In addition to being commercial successes, the Bourne films also earned critical praise for their intelligence and kinetic pace.
Damon’s other roles in the early 2000s included an energy analyst who gets caught in the underside of the oil industry in Syriana (2005) and an agent forced to give up his family life in the early days of the CIA in Robert De Niro’s The Good Shepherd (2006).
Also in 2006 Damon starred opposite Leonardo DiCaprio and Jack Nicholson in The Departed; the crime thriller, which was directed by Martin Scorsese, won an Academy Award for best picture.
Damon portrayed an unreliable whistleblower in Steven Soderbergh’s dark comedy The Informant! (2009).
In Clint Eastwood’s Invictus (2009), Damon starred as the captain of the South African rugby team urged by Nelson Mandela (played by Morgan Freeman) to win the 1995 World Cup in order to unite the racially divided country; for his performance, Damon earned an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor.
After appearing as an army officer searching for weapons of mass destruction in the Iraq War drama Green Zone (2010), Damon reteamed with Eastwood on Hereafter (2010), a supernatural drama in which Damon played a reluctant psychic.
Damon than appered in the Coen brothers’ remake of the 1969 John Wayne-starring Western True Grit (2010).
In 2011, in the sci-fi drama The Adjustment Bureau he played a politician romancing Emily Blunt’s dancer character.
Also in 2011 he appeared as a man whose wife is stricken by a deadly virus in Soderbergh’s thriller Contagion and as a widower who moves his family to a wildlife park in the sentimental We Bought a Zoo.
In 2012, Damon filmed Promised Land, directed by Gus Van Sant, which he co-wrote with John Krasinski.
Damon’s next film with frequent collaborator Steven Soderbergh was Behind the Candelabra (2013), a drama about the life of pianist/entertainer Liberace (played by Michael Douglas) with Damon playing Liberace’s longtime partner Scott Thorson.
In 2013 Damon starred in the science fiction film Elysium, where he played former car-thief-turned-factory-worker Max DeCosta. In the same year he appeared in the science fiction movie The Zero Theorem by Terry Gilliam.
In 2014, he starred in George Clooney‘s The Monuments Men, and played the minor role of scientist Dr. Mann, in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar.
He played the main character, astronaut Mark Watney, in Ridley Scott’s The Martian (2015), based on Andy Weir’s best-selling novel of the same name, a role that earned him the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy and his second Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.
In 2016 he appeared in the fantasy thriller The Great Wall, playing a mercenary battling monsters at
the Great Wall of China.
Damon has received an Academy Award from five nominations, two Golden Globe Awards from eight nominations, and has been nominated for two British Academy Film Awards and six Emmy Awards.
Matt Damon has an estimated net worth of $160 million.
Damon married longtime girlfriend, Argentine-born Luciana Bozán Barroso, in December 2005 in New York City Hall. They had met while he was filming Stuck On You in Miami, where she was working as a bartender. The couple has three daughters: Isabella (b. June 2006), Gia Zavala (b. August 2008), and Stella Zavala (b. October 2010). Damon also has a stepdaughter, Alexia Barroso (b. 1998), from Luciana’s previous marriage.
Matt is the real-life best friend of Ben Affleck. Each has starred together or had cameos in each of the other’s films.
He and Ben Affleck lived two blocks away from each other in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when they were children.
Damon has competed in several World Series of Poker (WSOP) events.
In 1998 Damon played in $10,000 buy-in Texas Hold ‘Em tournament at the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. He was knocked out in the first day by poker legend Doyle Brunson. Damon had kings, Brunson aces.
To perfect his Southern accent for his role as Rudy Baylor in The Rainmaker (1997), he tended bar in Knoxville, TN, for free. Later he hired one of the customers to serve as his dialect coach.
Damon learned to play piano for the film The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999).
He started a bowling league in Berlin while making The Bourne Supremacy (2004).
Matt is a big fan of the Boston Red Sox and he tries to attend their games whenever possible. After the team won the 2007 World Series, he narrated the commemorative DVD release of the event.
Damon became the 2,343rd person to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on July 25, 2007.
He dropped out of Harvard 12 credits short of graduating to pursue his acting career.
Damon Co-founded H20 Africa, an organization that brings clean drinking water to three million people in developing countries.
He is sometimes (but rarely) mistaken for actor Mark Wahlberg.
Matt quit smoking after visiting a hypnotist in L.A.