Who

D'Onofrio is the exceedingly intense actor who played Private Pyle in Full Metal Jacket and currently stars as Detective Robert Goren on Law & Order: Criminal Intent.

Backstory

Brooklyn-born D'Onofrio grew up in Hawaii, Colorado, and Florida before returning to New York in the late '70s to start an acting career. During his early days in the city, he paid the bills as a bouncer at the Hard Rock Café (where an angry customer once broke his nose by hitting him the face with a ketchup bottle) and made do with parts in NYU student films. He landed his first Broadway role in 1984's Open Admissions. He had a small part on Miami Vice (which is where he first crossed paths with Dick Wolf), before  his career-making role as a suicidal soldier in Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket in 1987. During the '90s, D'Onofrio was a busy character actor, bouncing between dramatic parts in JFK, Household Saints, and The Whole Wide World, and less serious roles in Mr. Wonderful and Barry Sonnenfeld's Men in Black. D'Onofrio hasn't had much time to devote to films since being cast as Bobby Goren on Law & Order in 2001, but he managed to play a surly dad in 2005's Thumbsucker and Vince Vaughn's neurotic brother in 2006's The Break-Up.

Of note

D'Onofrio is now a regular on Law & Order: Criminal Intent, where his character has a superhuman knack for getting inside the heads of the most hardened criminals, thus convincing them to divulge all their secrets on the spot. Apparently it's not such an easy gig—D'Onofrio twice collapsed on the set in 2004 and was taken to the hospital for "exhaustion." He later split his TV duties with actor Chris Noth until Noth announced plans to leave the show in 2008. (Noth will be replaced by Jeff Goldblum.) D'Onofrio now only has to handle half of the 22 episodes each season, although the series isn't quite as popular as it used to be, a fact reflected in NBC's decision to move the series to USA in 2007.

Personal

The chain-smoking actor was married to actress Greta Scacchi from 1991 to 1993; they had one daughter, Leila. For a long time Scacchi was angry about the breakup, telling an interviewer in 2004 that he "persuaded" her to have a child, and then walked out on her. In 1997, he married Carin van der Donk. The couple had one son, Elias, separated, and then reconciled. They sold their Christadora House condo for $2.6 million in February 2007 and moved to an apartment on East 18th Street.

True story

Director Tim Burton so disliked D'Onofrio's portrayal of Orson Welles in 1994's Ed Wood that he had his voiced dubbed over.