Chris Cooper to Receive Peter J. Owens Award

On April 21 at the Castro Theatre, Chris Cooper will be the recipient of the Festival’s Peter J. Owens Award. There will be a tribute to Cooper featuring retrospective film clips and an onstage interview prior to a screening of John Sayles’s Matewan (1987).

Executive Director Roxanne Messina Captor announced Cooper’s upcoming appearance at the Festival saying, “The Film Society is honored to present the Peter J. Owens Award for a brilliant and independent career to Chris Cooper, one of America’s finest actors. He has shown courage and care in his choice of roles, avoiding archetypal parts, preferring instead to play layered characters who reveal themselves over time.” Chris Cooper has won audiences around the world with his performances in widely diverse roles in films as varied as Lone Star, American Beauty and The Bourne Identity. He will be seen in three upcoming films including John Sayles’s latest, Silver City, the title role in Miller and the drama, Conquistadora.

Cooper was born in Kansas City, Missouri and later attended the University of Missouri drama school. To further his training, he studied at the world famous Stella Adler Academy. He got his start in John Sayles’s labor drama, Matewan, and built his career in film and television with parts like July Johnson in Lonesome Dove, Sheriff Sam Deeds in Lone Star and orchid aficionado John Laroche in Adaptation. For the latter, he won both the Oscar and Golden Globe for best supporting actor. With his most recent movie, Seabiscuit, he was nominated for a Screen Actor’s Guild award (his third such nomination). Preferring to play people who are, in his words, “concealed,” Cooper cracks open the carapace of his characters to disclose the essences they have within.

The Award will be presented to Cooper Thursday, April 22 at Film Society Awards Night at the Ritz-Carlton, San Francisco. The Film Society will be the beneficiary of the gala black-tie fundraiser honoring Cooper and Milos Forman, recipient of the Film Society Directing Award.

Previous recipients of the Peter J. Owens Award are Dustin Hoffman, Kevin Spacey, Stockard Channing, Winona Ryder, Sean Penn, Nicolas Cage, Annette Bening and Harvey Keitel. The Peter J. Owens Award is made possible through a grant from the Peter J. Owens Trust at the San Francisco Foundation.