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Charlie Sheen

Charlie Sheen has built a screen career around a useful tension: he can play the earnest young man entering a dangerous world, or the confident wise guy who already thinks he owns it. Born Carlos Irwin Estévez in New York City on September 3, 1965, he grew up in an acting family and began making amateur Super 8 films while attending Santa Monica High School. After leaving school, he adopted the stage name Charlie Sheen and pursued acting full time. His early film work moved quickly through several defining 1980s genres. After appearing in the Cold War drama Red Dawn, Sheen made an outsized impression during a brief police-station scene in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and took a supporting role in the coming-of-age drama Lucas. Platoon provided his breakthrough, placing him at the center of Oliver Stone’s Vietnam War film. He reunited with Stone for Wall Street, playing Bud Fox, an ambitious young stockbroker drawn into a far more ruthless game. That intensity did not lock Sheen into one mode. In 1988, he joined two very different ensembles, portraying baseball player Happy Felsch in Eight Men Out and regulator Richard M. Brewer in the western Young Guns. His own background as a high-school pitcher and shortstop added an interesting connection to the baseball roles. Major League then gave him one of his best-known characters, hard-throwing closer Ricky “Wild Thing” Vaughn. Sheen’s straight-faced delivery proved especially well suited to parody. As the ace pilot at the center of Hot Shots!, he treated every absurdity with exaggerated seriousness, letting the comedy build around him. Later appearances found him playing a fictional version of himself in Being John Malkovich and returning to spoof territory in Scary Movie 3. Television became a major part of his career after he joined Spin City, followed by his long-running role as Charlie Harper in Two and a Half Men and the lead in Anger Management. Across war films, sports movies, westerns, satire and sitcoms, Sheen’s most effective performances make use of the same quality: an ability to shift between sincerity and self-aware swagger without losing his easy screen presence.