Who

Hawke is the sincere and scruffy actor/novelist/Gen-X icon who was previously one-half of an NYC power couple with Uma Thurman.

Backstory

Texas-born, Jersey-bred Hawke made his first stage appearance at age 12 in a production of George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan at Princeton's McCarter Theatre. His movie debut came two years later in a fantasy flick called Explorers, and he got a break in 1989 when he appeared as one of Robin Williams's pupils in director Peter Weir's Dead Poets Society. But despite the film's success, Hawke spent the next few years appearing in small indies and shlocky studio films (like 1991's Mystery Date) until he made a splash as Winona Ryder's moody and misanthropic love interest in the 1994 Ben Stiller-directed film Reality Bites, a role that firmly planted him on the Gen-X cultural map and in the hearts of starry-eyed young girls everywhere. A handful of critical favorites followed, like 1995's Before Sunrise and 1997's Gattaca (on whose set he met future wife Uma Thurman), before he earned an Oscar nod in 2001 for his performance opposite Denzel Washington in the bad-cop thriller Training Day.

Lately Hawke has primarily focused his attention on indie flicks and writing. In addition to his screenplays and novels, he made a star turn in a 2000 modern-day adaptation of Hamlet, lent his voice to Richard Linklater's 2001 animated opus Waking Life, and reprised the role of Jesse in Linklater's Before Sunset in 2004. Hawke also solidified his highbrow credentials with a stage role as anarchist Mikhail Bakunin in Tom Stoppard's eight-hour Russian-intellectual-history drama The Coast of Utopia, which ran at Lincoln Center from October 2006 through May 2007. Later that year Hawke directed his friend Jonathan Marc Sherman's play Things We Want, starring Josh Hamilton and Peter Dinklage, at the Acorn Theater.

On the side

Don't mistake Hawke for just another pretty face: He's a full-blown Man Of Letters. He's published two novels—The Hottest State in 1997 and Ash Wednesday in 2002—and directed the film adaptation of The Hottest State, which was released in August 2007. (He also directed the little-noted 2001 ensemble drama Chelsea Walls, produced by Gary Winick and Christine Vachon.) He was nominated for an Academy Award in 2005 for his script work on Before Sunset. He's said that working on the screenplay was the "high point" of his life thus far.

Personal

Hawke was married to Uma Thurman from 1998 to 2004. The couple split after he cheated on her with aspiring model Jenny Perzow while filming a movie in Canada. (Poor Ethan says the affair left him "racked with guilt" and he lost 50 pounds during the divorce proceedings.) The couple now shares custody of their two children, Maya and Levon. In 2008, Ethan married  Maya and Levon's former nanny Ryan Shawhughes. The two have since had a daughter of their own, Clementine Jane Hawke.

Habitat

In 2006, Thurman paid Hawke $2.8 million for full ownership of the Gramercy duplex they once shared. He now lives in a two-bedroom apartment in Chelsea and spends vacations at a three-bedroom home he owns in Nova Scotia.

No joke

Hawke told Details magazine that he questions the very notion of monogamy because the greatest leaders in history—like Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy—weren't monogamous.