Profile of Elijah Wood on Famous Like Me

Elijah Jordan Wood (born January 28, 1981 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa) is a U.S. actor of English, Irish, German and Polish descent. He is the middle of three children born to Warren and Debbie Wood, who nicknamed Elijah "Spark Plug" because he was a manically energetic child. He has a brother Zack, a video game producer and seven years his senior, as well as a younger sister Hannah, a poet and actress who has had small roles in a number of his films.

A professional actor since the age of nine, Wood is best known for the role of Frodo Baggins in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. He took the stage in his elementary school's rendition of the play The Sound of Music. The following year, he graduated to the title character of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Wood also served as choir boy during the production of See How They Run, produced by the Marion Creative Council.

Making his film debut with a minor part in Back to the Future II in 1989, Wood landed a succession of subsequent larger roles and became a critically acclaimed child actor. His performance in The War gained him a nomination by the YoungStar Awards (for which he was nominated five times and won once), and Roger Ebert said in his review of the film that "Elijah Wood has emerged, I believe, as the most talented actor in his age group in Hollywood history."

His role as Frodo in The Lord of the Rings made him a star, but he has thus far resisted typecasting by recently choosing less sympathetic roles, such as a stalker in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and a mute psychopath cannibal serial killer in Sin City.

Wood recently won the role of a young Iggy Pop in a yet-to-be-filmed biographical account of the rock-star.

He will also start his own record label, Simian, later this year.

Filmography

• Back to the Future II (1989)
• Internal Affairs (1990)
• Avalon (1990)
• Paradise (1991)
• Radio Flyer (1992)
• Day-O (1992)
• Huck Finn (1993)
• Forever Young (1992)
• North (1994)
• The Good Son (1993)
• The War (1994)
• Flipper (1996)
• The Ice Storm (1997)
• Oliver Twist (1997)
• Deep Impact (1998)
• The Faculty (1998)
• Black and White (1999)
• Chain Of Fools (2000)
• The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
• The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)
• All I Want (2003)
• Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over (2003)
• The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)
• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
• Sin City (2005)
• Green Street Hooligans (2005)
• MTV Presents: The Next Generation Xbox Revealed (2005)
• Bobby (2006)
• Everything Is Illuminated
• Happy Feet (voice) (Post-production)

Trivia

Wood is a huge music buff who claims to own something in the range of 3,000 CD's, and cites his favourite band as the Smashing Pumpkins.

He briefly dated German actress Franka Potente. During a recent interview with Conan O'Brien, he laughed off rumors that he is gay, even recommending one website which makes such claims, calling it "hilarious". He is currently dating Pam Racine, a bandmate of actor/singer Eugene Hütz, who introduced the two while co-starring in Wood's latest film Everything Is Illuminated. She rarely appears with him in public, and they keep a low-profie, but friends say the couple is almost inseparable.

Wood is a Catholic and claims to still pray every night.

While filming The Faculty he learned that casting had begun for New Zealand director Peter Jackson’s epic production of J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic novel trilogy The Lord of the Rings. Wood immediately had his friend, director George Huang, film an audition tape of him running in the fields with crudely made Hobbit feet, and sent the tape to Jackson. Despite Jackson’s initial assertion that all of the Hobbit characters would be played by British actors, he was immediately won over by Wood’s audition and the American Wood was cast in the lead role of Tolkien’s diminutive hero Frodo Baggins. Jackson later said he could not possibly imagine another actor in the world who would be better-suited to Frodo.

The cast of the Rings movies was nominated for Best Ensemble Acting at the Screen Actors Guild Awards for three years in a row. They finally won in 2003, for the third film The Return of the King. For his performance as Frodo Baggins, Elijah Wood was nominated by the MTV Movie Awards and for the final installment, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, he was nominated for a British Academy Award for Best Actor.

In an interview about his latest film Everything Is Illuminated, director Liev Schreiber commented that his leading man Elijah Wood has a "generosity of spirit" and a "sincere goodness as a human being".

Quotes

• "There's a lot more to life than Hollywood."

• "Child acting is a cutthroat world, which is pretty frightening and really silly in retrospect. But it's the parents who are evil. It is a really difficult world to live in if you don't have a base, if you don't have a strong sense of yourself. My mom wanted me to maintain a reasonable degree of normalcy and to enjoy my childhood. Family is so important. I rarely meet families who are as close as we are. I feel really blessed."

• "I find it offensive that it reflects on us that we as a society are fascinated by other people's lives and need that kind of information and it's more sensitive when you are kind of in the middle of it and you recognize that that could kind of be you at some point or people could be that interested in your private life and it's a weird thing. It's bizarre. I still find it incredibly strange, the breakup of Brad and Gwyneth made the front page of newspapers. That's our focus? That's kind of sad."

• "I will be completely honest. I am not a huge fan of awards shows. It's a little -- it can be a little overwhelming -- it was fun for "Lord of the Rings" and I enjoyed the process, the first couple of times for the first couple of award shows, but once you've been to five in a row, it's a lot of fanfare that gets kind of old, especially if you're not particularly interested in the awards. I don't find it to be all that important. I would rather be home watching those kind of things on television. My God, the Oscars were -- I think it was like five hours. I was nearly falling asleep on camera. It was funny."

• "I'm kind of insane when it comes to music, a little obsessed."

• "I think being different, going against the grain of society is the greatest thing in the world."

• "There's a real purity in New Zealand that doesn't exist in the states. It's actually not an easy thing to find in our world anymore. It's a unique place because it is so far away from the rest of the world. There is a sense of isolation and also being protected."

• "I really don't think there is anybody in the business with better eyes than Elijah Wood"- Liev Schreiber

• "If the eyes are the windows to the soul, Elijah Wood has garage doors."- Liev Schreiber

• "No, I hadn’t worked with any of them. But I had been a huge fan of Elijah Wood even though he was only 18 when we started filming. I had seen almost all his movies, and I really like his work. I admired him because I was a child actor too and he was such an exquisite example of someone’s ability to carve out a career as a child performer with integrity and class."- Sean Astin

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