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Matthew Paige Damon ( DAY-mən; born October 8, 1970) is an American actor, film producer, and screenwriter. He was ranked among Forbes' most bankable stars in 2007, and in 2010 was one of the highest-grossing actors of all time. He has received various awards and nominations, including an Academy Award and two Golden Globe Awards, in addition to nominations for three British Academy Film Awards and seven Primetime Emmy Awards. Damon began his acting career in the film Mystic Pizza (1988). He gained prominence in 1997 when he and Ben Affleck wrote and starred in Good Will Hunting, which won them the Academy Award and Golden Globe for Best Screenplay. He established himself as a leading man by starring as Tom Ripley in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), Jason Bourne in the Bourne franchise (2002–2007; 2016), and con man Linus Caldwell in the Ocean's trilogy (2001–2007). Damon's other notable roles have been in Saving Private Ryan (1998), Syriana (2005), The Departed (2006), The Informant!, Invictus (both 2009), True Grit (2010), Contagion (2011), Ford v Ferrari (2019), Stillwater, The Last Duel (both 2021), Air, and Oppenheimer (both 2023), the last of which is his highest-grossing feature. He won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor for playing an astronaut stranded on Mars in The Martian (2015). On television, Damon portrayed Scott Thorson in the HBO biopic Behind the Candelabra (2013), for which he was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award. He appeared on 30 Rock in 2011 and Saturday Night Live in 2019. He also produced the reality series Project Greenlight (2001–2015) as well as the film Manchester by the Sea (2016). Damon has performed voice-over work in both animated and documentary films as well as established two production companies with Affleck. He has been involved in charitable work with organizations including the One Campaign, H2O Africa Foundation, Feeding America, and Water.org. Early life and education Damon was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts on October 8, 1970, the second son of Kent Telfer Damon (1942–2017), a stockbroker, and Nancy Carlsson-Paige (b. 1946), an early childhood education professor at Lesley University. His father had English and Scottish ancestry, while his mother is of Finnish and Swedish descent; her family surname had been changed from Pajari to Paige. Damon and his family moved to Newton for two years. His parents divorced when he was two years old, and he and his brother returned with their mother to Cambridge, where they lived in a six-family communal house. His brother, Kyle, is a sculptor and artist. Damon has said that, as a teenager, he had felt lonely, as if he did not belong, and that his mother's by-the-book approach to child-rearing had made it hard for him to define his own identity. Damon attended Cambridge Alternative School and Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, and was a good student. He acted in several high-school theater productions, and has credited his drama teacher, Gerry Speca, as having had an important artistic influence on him—-although noting wryly that Speca had given Ben Affleck (Damon’s close friend and schoolmate) the "biggest roles and longest speeches". He attended Harvard University as a member of the class of 1992, residing in Lowell House, but left before receiving his degree to take a lead role in the film Geronimo: An American Legend. While at Harvard, as an exercise for an English class, Damon wrote an essay in the form of a film treatment which was later developed into the screenplay Good Will Hunting (for which he received an Academy Award). At Harvard, Damon was a member of the Delphic Club, one of the university’s elite Final Clubs. In 2013, he was awarded the Harvard Arts Medal. Career 1988–1999: Early work and breakthrough Damon entered Harvard in 1988, where he appeared in student theater plays, such as Burn This and A... My Name is Alice. Later, he made his film debut at the age of 18, with a single line of dialogue in the romantic comedy Mystic Pizza. As a student at Harvard, he acted in small roles such as in the TNT original film Rising Son and the ensemble prep-school drama School Ties. He left the school in 1992, a semester (12 credits) shy of completing his Bachelor of Arts in English to feature in Geronimo: An American Legend in Los Angeles, erroneously expecting the movie to become a big success. Damon next appeared as an opiate-addicted soldier in 1996's Courage Under Fire, for which he lost 40 pounds (18 kg) in 100 days on a self-prescribed diet and fitness regimen. Courage Under Fire gained him critical notice, when The Washington Post labeled his performance "impressive". During the early 1990s, Damon and Affleck wrote Good Will Hunting (1997), a screenplay about a young mathematics genius, an extension of a screenplay he wrote for an assignment at Harvard, having integrated advice from director Rob Reiner, screenwriter William Goldman, and writer/director Kevin Smith. He asked Affleck to perform the scenes with him in front of the class and, when Damon later moved into Affleck's Los Angeles apartment, they began working on the script more seriously. The film, which they wrote mainly during improvisation sessions, was set partly in their hometown of Cambridge, and drew from their own experiences. They sold the screenplay to Castle Rock in 1994, but after a conflict with the company, they convinced Miramax to purchase the script. The film received critical praise; Quentin Curtis of The Daily Telegraph found "real wit and vigour, and some depth" in their writing and Emanuel Levy of Variety wrote of Damon's acting, "[he] gives a charismatic performance in a demanding role that's bound to catapult him to stardom. Perfectly cast, he makes the aching, step-by-step transformation of Will realistic and credible." It received nine Academy Awards nominations, including Best Actor for Damon; he and Affleck won the Oscar and Golden Globe Award for Best Screenplay. He and Affleck were each paid salaries of $600,000, while the film grossed over $225 million at the worldwide box office. The two later parodied their roles from the film in Kevin Smith's 2001 movie Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. Speaking of his "overnight success" through Good Will Hunting, Damon said by that time he had been working in the cinema for 11 years, but still found the change "nearly indescribable—going from total obscurity to walking down a street in New York and having everybody turn and look". Before the film, Damon played the lead in the critically acclaimed drama The Rainmaker (1997), where he was recognized by the Los Angeles Times as "a talented young actor on the brink of stardom." For the role, Damon regained most of the weight he had lost for Courage Under Fire. After meeting Damon on the set of Good Will Hunting, director Steven Spielberg cast him in the brief title role in the 1998 World War II film Saving Private Ryan. He co-starred with Edward Norton in the 1998 poker film Rounders, wher.... Discover the Luciana Lombardo popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Luciana Lombardo books.