On September 17th, Ethan Hawke will be honored with a Donostia Award at the 64th edition of the San Sebastian Festival. The award will be presented to Hawke (Austin, Texas, 1970) in a ceremony celebrating his three decade-long career prior to the festival's gala screening of The Magnificent Seven.
Hawke's career, spanning thirty years and four Academy Award nominations, has solidified his reputation as a truly multifaceted artist, challenging himself as a screenwriter, director, novelist, and actor of the stage and screen.
Hawke made his documentary directorial debut in 2015 with Seymour: An Introduction, an intimate portrait of the life of legendary pianist and piano teacher Seymour Bernstein. The 2014 film Boyhood marked his eighth collaboration with director Richard Linklater. For his performance, Ethan received Academy Award, Screen Actors Guild (SAG), Golden Globe, BAFTA, Film Independent Spirit, Critics' Choice, and Gotham Independent Spirit Award nominations for Best Supporting Actor.
Marking another one of his celebrated projects with Linklater, Hawke starred opposite Julie Delpy in the critically acclaimed film Before Sunrise and its two sequels Before Sunset and Before Midnight. The trio co-wrote the screenplays for Before Sunset and Before Midnight and received Academy Award and Independent Spirit Award nominations for both scripts. Hawke, Linklater, and Delpy were honoured with the Louis XIII Genius Award for achievement in cinematic works for the Before films at the BFCA Critics Choice Awards.
In 2002, Hawke received his first Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his work in Antoine Fuqua's Academy Award-winning film Training Day opposite Denzel Washington. His additional credits include: Dead Poets Society, Good Kill, Reality Bites, Great Expectations, Hamlet, Gattaca, Brooklyn's Finest, The Purge, and Before The Devil Knows You're Dead.
Hawke's acting career has always lived side by side with his love of writing and telling stories. He is the author of four novels: The Hottest State (1996), Ash Wednesday (2002), Rules for a Knight (2015), and the graphic novel Indeh (2016), which debuted #1 on the New York Times Best Seller List.
The Magnificent Seven marks his latest collaboration with Antoine Fuqua. The film, to be screened at San Sebastian after closing Venice, is a remake of John Sturges's 1960 movie, based on Akira Kurosawa's Shichinin no Samurai / Seven Samurai, with a screenplay by John Lee Hancock (The Blind Side) and Nic Pizzolatto (True Detective). Hawke stars in the film alongside Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt and Vincent D'Onofrio.
Earlier this year marked one of the actor's most celebrated and critically acclaimed roles as the late Chet Baker in Robert Budreu's Born to Be Blue, a performance that, according to Rolling Stone, contained "everything that makes Ethan Hawke an extraordinary actor - his energy, his empathy, his fearlessness, [and] vanity-free eagerness to explore the deeper recesses of a character," and which Variety called "one of the best performances of his career." In addition to Born to Be Blue and The Magnificent Seven, this year brings a diverse and exciting slate of work from Hawke, including The Phenom, Maggie's Plan, and In A Valley of Violence.
Last year the Festival opened with Alejandro Amenábar's Regression, starring Hawke, who unfortunately was unable to attend due to his filming commitments on The Magnificent Seven. As the actor's ever-expanding film repertoire comes full circle, the festival is thrilled to be able to honour Hawke in person with this year's Donostia Award.
Source & Image: SanSabastianFestival
