Vincent Gallo

VINCENT GALLO

Date of Birth: April 11, 1961

It may be true that you can go home again as this Buffalo, New York, native did for his directorial debut (he also wrote and stars in the movie) with a film he even named after his hometown—Buffalo 66.

The film and Gallo himself both made waves at the Sundance Film Festival—the film because it was good and Gallo because he copped a lot of attitude and said he wouldn't give any interviews to magazines unless they put him on the cover. But then you'd expect nothing less for a cover boy who once did commercials for Calvin Klein's CK fragrance.

Gallo is also a painter, having had over 25 one-man shows of his paintings. However, he says, "I stopped painting in 1990 at the peak of my success just to deny people my beautiful paintings. And I did it out of spite."

When his second feature, The Brown Bunny debuted at Cannes in 2003, it wasn't well received. He blamed the negative reviews on having been pressured to show the movie when it wasn't yet finished. The movie received a theatrical release in 2004, but didn't even come close to making back the $10 million it cost to make. His next film, Promises Written in Water (2010) reportedly began filming without any preparation or a traditional script. It screened at the Venice Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival, but was never picked up by a distributor.

Though he claims: "I never wanted to be an actor. I want to be a movie star. The whole idea of having to act is too gruesome," he was cast in the title role in Francis Ford Coppola's Tetro and followed that up with a starring role in Essential Killing (2011), for which he won Best Actor at the 2010 Venice Film Festival.