Chris Cooper Gives 'Married Life' a Whirl

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Chris Cooper: Oscar winner's films include Seabiscuit, American Beauty, Capote and many more.

Sony Pictures Classics

Chris Cooper: Oscar winner's films include Seabiscuit, American Beauty, Capote and many more.

Since playing an introspective sheriff in the 1996 film Lone Star, actor Chris Cooper has gradually become more familiar to movie audiences. He won an Oscar in 2003 for playing an eccentric orchid thief in Adaptation and delivered a riveting performance as FBI agent Robert Hanssen in Breach.

"Cooper has long been an actor's actor," wrote Mary McNamara in the Los Angeles Times. "A slight man, he can project heft when he needs to, and his lined and watchful face, eyes tending toward a squint, can seem naturally menacing or noble, lost or kind."

Cooper was a late bloomer in film. He spent years doing theater and didn't make his first movie until he was 37. Although he's made over 40 films since then, he's never become immersed in Hollywood culture. He and his wife of 25 years, actress Marianne Leone, still live in Kingston, Mass.

Cooper's latest project is Married Life, a new film with Patricia Clarkson, Pierce Brosnan and Rachel McAdams. It's a black comedy about a 1940s philanderer who falls for a younger woman (McAdams) but still loves his wife (Clarkson) — loves her enough, in fact, to plot her demise rather than divorce and disappoint her.