There are very few peers in Kevin Spacey’s league. These would be actors capable of conveying a world of emotion and meaning with a look, a posture. His characters leap off the screen, alive in the full complexity of the word. His characters are multi-dimensional; his heroes are fallible and his villains arouse sympathy. Spacey always leaves his audience with a sense that there is so much more – barely contained mystery smouldering just beneath the surface.

In an acting range that would have many weeping with unadulterated envy, he has portrayed everything from the hopelessly naive and insecure in Shipping News to salesman sleaze in Glengarry Glen Ross to the downright scary in Seven. Often audiences are exposed to the roller coaster of his acting versatility in a single movie, as he showed in the movie K-Pax, leaving audiences guessing as to the true nature of his character: serene, alien, or deranged victim... His performances are consistently brilliant, demanding on him as an actor, and challenging to his audience.

While we leave cinemas feeling an intimate, if ambiguous empathy for his characters, we know very little about Kevin Spacey, the person. Intensely private, not only does Spacey reveal precious little about himself, but won’t even commit his opinion publicly. When asked for his point of view on the death penalty following the release of The Life Of David Gale, a movie that deals with the issue, he said: “Here’s why I feel strongly that I don’t want to take a position on it. They put people on television, whether it’s abortion or gay rights or the death penalty, and the second someone declares their position, people stop listening.”

I suspect the most beautiful thing people can come to realize is where they fit in the world.

Spacey’s childhood was marked by frequent moves across America. His father was a technical writer and moved the family to wherever he could find work. “I was constantly being thrown into a new school, thrown into a new church and the new kid on the block,” says Spacey. “Always, always, always. Starting over again. I’ll never forget this. I remember lying in the bottom of an empty pool with my best friend at the time. I was lying on my back and my friend was lying on his back and we were looking up at the sky, the night before the moving vans were coming. And I remember I was so upset that I was moving. I must have been nine years old.”

Probably as a result of his unhappiness at this unsettled upbringing, Kevin started acting out. After setting his sister’s tree house on fire (Kevin alludes to this only as “an incident involving a tree house and matches”), he was sent off to Northridge Military Academy. After only a few months at Northridge, he was expelled for throwing a tire at a classmate during a fight. His next stop was Chatsworth High School in the San Fernando Valley, where a school counsellor suggested drama as a more suitable outlet for all that pent up energy.

Also working part-time selling shoes at a nearby mall, he served customers while doing dead-on imitations of Johnny Carson and Jack Lemmon. Spacey threw himself whole-heartedly into his acting. His interest in acting and his nearly encyclopaedic film knowledge actually began at an early age, when he would sneak downstairs to watch the late show on TV. Later, in high school, he and his friends reportedly cut class to catch revival films at the NuArt Theatre. Regardless of these class-cutting tendencies, Spacey adjusted so well to Chatsworth that he was elected co-valedictorian of his high school class in 1977.

Also in their senior year, Kevin played Captain von Trapp to Mare Winningham’s Maria. Upon hearing of his Oscar nomination in 1996, Winningham sent a telegram to Spacey saying: “Captain von Trapp – congratulations on your nomination – Maria.”

I’m not married and I won’t talk about my private life, so it must mean I’m gay.

He briefly attended Los Angeles Valley College, then left to join the drama program at Juilliard, quitting after two years. Even though Spacey left without graduating, he learned much at Juilliard. He remembers: “I had a teacher at Juilliard that was incredible, who I presumed didn’t care for me because she was so tough on me, and I said that one day in sort of heated anger about some confrontation that we had. She said to me, ‘You big idiot!’ She said, ‘Don’t you realize that I’m hard on you because I think and I know that you’re the most talented student in this class and the laziest.’ And I was, like ‘whoa!’ I think people drop seeds, and sometimes it took a while for those seeds to grow [and] for me to realize that, ‘Oh, you mean I really have to work? I have to work at this?’ So, umm, I went to work.”

His first professional stage appearance was as a messenger in the 1981 production of Joe Papp’s Henry VI. Papp also gave him an office job, then happened to catch Spacey’s performance in a small off-off-Broadway production. Clearly a man of great vision, Papp fired Spacey the next day, telling Spacey he should be a star, not a pencil pusher.
Papp’s vision proved spot on. You know you’ve arrived as an actor when you are voted greatest actor of the decade by Empire Magazine (1999), not to mention when you play yourself in an Austin Powers movie (Goldmember). But Spacey continues to choose his roles with care. Says Spacey: “I’m motivated by real motivations, by real characters, by real stories and I try not to be impressed by the elements of film. Sometimes I think it’s very easy to be seduced by all the things that surround a movie; the director, the co-star, the money they are offering, all of those things tend to taint your ability to judge a good story.”

And a good story is all Spacey needs to convince his audiences that they are not watching a movie, but getting a glimpse at the life of a real person. Like a prism splitting white light into its component colours, Spacey brings detailed authenticity to his roles, and for an hour or two even cynical adults stare transfixed at a screen and believe.