After a flourishing career in theater and cinema, where his anti-hero characters won him two Oscars, Kevin Spacey was caught up in a series of accusations of sexual assault, which relegated him to the rank of persona non grata in Hollywood.
American actor Kevin Spacey arrived in court on Wednesday June 28 in London, where he is to be tried for several sexual assaults dating back to the oldest in the early 2000s, and which he denies having committed. The 63-year-old Hollywood star has pleaded not guilty to all 12 charges against him which were revealed in the wake of the #MeToo movement, putting his career on hold. This trial at Southwark Crown Court in south London is expected to last a month.
The actor’s career came to a screeching halt at the end of 2017. He built it on mismatched roles like the forty-something loser wanting a teenage girl in American Beautypsychopathic serial killer in Sevenor the role of comic book villain in Superman Returns. The headliner of the series House of Cards is one of the first artists swept away by the global #MeToo wave. Denounced by several young men with similar accounts, he disappeared despite his denials from screens and boards. Since then, his public appearances have been limited to his disputes before the courts.
Born in New Jersey, the 63-year-old actor grew up in California. Briefly educated in a military school, before being expelled from it, he grew up under the authority of a father whom he recently described as “neo nazi” And “white supremacist” during a trial in New York. The father harbored an aversion to homosexuals and did not appreciate his son’s passion for the theater, according to the actor. This did not prevent him from joining the prestigious conservatory from the Juilliard School in New York in 1979.
Successful roles
On the boards, the actor met his first success in 1986 in a classic of American theater, The Long Journey to Night by Eugene O’Neill. The same year, he made his first film appearance, with a minor role as a subway pilferer in The burn. Human darkness quickly becomes his trademark. Cynical Hollywood producer in Swimming with Sharks in 1994, Spacey won his first Oscar the following year for a supporting role as a mysterious mobster in Usual Suspects.
In 1995, he also burst the screen as a fanatical serial killer, in the apocalyptic Seven by David Fincher. Before achieving fame in 1999 with American Beautyfor which he won the Oscar for best actor, thanks to his character as a frustrated forty-year-old who rebels against the banality of his suburban life and becomes infatuated with a friend of his daughter.
Beyond Hollywood, the actor does not abandon the theater. In 2003, he was appointed artistic director of the Old Vic in London, a historic establishment which he directed for more than ten years. He plays Shakespeare there and hosts modern stagings of great American classics. A London era that now catches up with him in court.
Fallen actor
The actor fell to the height of his fame, after five seasons spent on the poster of the series House of Cards, global success of Netflix where he camps an American parliamentarian without faith or law, ready to do anything to become president. In October 2017, three weeks after the #MeToo surge against producer Harvey Weinstein, actor Anthony Rapp explains that he was sexually assaulted at age 14 by Kevin Spacey in 1986.
The star immediately presents his “most sincere apologies” for his “drunken and deeply inappropriate (male) behavior“. An act dictated according to him by his agents, which he now regrets. “I learned the lesson, never apologize for something you didn’t do“, he dropped in October during his civil trial in New York. He also denied having wanted to create a diversion by publicly revealing his homosexuality, an open secret in the industry, during the scandal.
Anthony Rapp’s accusations, quickly followed by other allegations in the United States and the United Kingdom, caused Hollywood to relegate him to ghost status. In two months, Kevin Spacey was landed from House of Cards and urgently erased from the film All the money in the world : all of his takes had to be replayed by Canadian Christopher Plummer.
Deprived of the scene, the actor has yet never been sentenced. A New York court recently found him not guilty, and sexual assault charges against an 18-year-old bar worker in Massachusetts were dropped in 2019.