Caleb Casey McGuire Affleck-Boldt (born August 12, 1975) is an American actor. He is the recipient of various accolades, including an Academy Award, a British Academy Film Award and a Golden Globe Award. The younger brother of actor Ben Affleck, he began his career as a child actor, appearing in the PBS television film Lemon Sky (1988). He later appeared in three Gus Van Sant films: To Die For (1995), Good Will Hunting (1997), and Gerry (2002), and in Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's film series (2001—2007). His first leading role was in Steve Buscemi's independent comedy-drama Lonesome Jim (2006).
Affleck's breakthrough came in 2007, when he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance as Robert Ford in the Western drama The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and starred in brother's crime drama Gone Baby Gone. In 2010, he directed the mockumentary I'm Still Here. He went on to appear in Tower Heist (2011), ParaNorman (2012) and Interstellar (2014), and received praise for his performance as an outlaw in Ain't Them Bodies Saints (2013). In 2016, Affleck starred in the drama Manchester by the Sea, in which his performance as a grieving man earned him the Academy Award for Best Actor. He has since starred in the dramas A Ghost Story (2017) and The Old Man & the Gun (2018).
Early life and education :
Caleb Casey McGuire Affleck-Boldt was born on August 12, 1975, in Falmouth, Massachusetts, to Christopher Anne "Chris" Boldt and Timothy Byers Affleck. The surname "Affleck" is of Scottish origin. He also has Irish, German, English, and Swiss ancestry. Affleck's maternal great-great-grandfather, Heinrich Boldt, known for the discovery of the Curmsun Disc, emigrated from Prussia in the late 1840s. His mother was a Radcliffe College- and Harvard-educated elementary school teacher. His father worked sporadically as an auto mechanic, a carpenter, a bookie, an electrician, a bartender, and a janitor at Harvard University. In the mid-1960s, he had been a stage manager, director, writer and actor with the Theater Company of Boston. During Affleck's childhood, his father was "a disaster of a drinker".Affleck first started acting by "reenacting what was happening at home" during role play exercises at Alateen meetings.
After his parents divorced when he was nine, Affleck and his older brother, Ben, lived with their mother and visited their father weekly. He learned to speak Spanish during a year spent traveling around Mexico with his mother and brother when he was ten. The two brothers spent "all of our time together, pretty much. Obviously at school we were in different grades, but we had the same friends." When Affleck was fourteen, his father moved to Indio, California, to enter a rehabilitation facility, and later worked there as an addiction counselor. He reconnected with his father during visits to California as a teenager: "I got to know him, really, because he was sober for the first time ... The man I knew before that was just completely different."
Growing up in a politically active, liberal household in Central Square, Cambridge, Affleck and his brother were surrounded by people who worked in the arts, were regularly taken to the theater by their mother, and were encouraged to make their own home movies. The brothers sometimes appeared in local weather commercials and as movie extras because of their mother's friendship with a local casting director. Affleck acted in numerous high school theater productions while a student at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School. He has said he "wouldn't be an actor" if not for his high school theater teacher Gerry Speca: "He kind of turned me on to acting, why it can be fun, how it can be rewarding."
At age eighteen, Affleck moved to Los Angeles for a year to pursue an acting career, and lived with his brother and their childhood friend Matt Damon. Despite having "the best possible first experience" while filming To Die For, he spent much of the year working as a busboy at a restaurant in Pasadena. He decided to move to Washington, D.C., to study politics at George Washington University. He soon transferred to Columbia University in New York City, where he followed the Core Curriculum for a total of two years. However, he did not graduate: "I would do a semester of school, go do a movie ... Opportunities kept presenting themselves that were hard for me to turn down ... By then, I didn't really have roots at the school or a group of friends."
