James Spader Wiki, Bio, Age, Net Worth, and Other Facts

James Spader Wiki, Bio, Age, Net Worth, and Other Facts

Below is a compiled list of the most interesting facts about James Spader. Check it out!

James Todd Spader was born on February 7, 1960 in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of teachers Jean (Fraser) and Stoddard Greenwood “Todd” Spader. He attended Phillips Academy in Andover with director Peter Sellars; he dropped out in eleventh grade. He bused tables, shoveled manure, and taught yoga before landing his first roles. Spader’s first major film role was as Brooke Shields’ brother in the romance drama Endless Love (1981). Spader graduated from television movies to Brat Pack films, playing the scoundrel. In Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989), he played a sexual voyeur who complicates the lives of three Baton Rouge residents. This performance earned him the Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival and led to bigger and more varied roles. His best known role is the colorful attorney Alan Shore on the David E. Kelley television series The Practice (1997) and its spin-off Boston Legal (2004).

Interesting Facts about James Spader

  • Good friends with actors Christian Clemenson, Robert Downey Jr., Eric Stoltz, Jason Alexander, and director Rowdy Herrington.
  • Parents are Stoddard Greenwood and Jean (Fraser) Spader, both educators.
  • Was close friends with John Kennedy Jr., both having attended Phillips Academy (Andover) high school together. Spader even dined occasionally with John Jr. at his mother Jacqueline Kennedy’s Upper East Side apartment in New York.
  • First performer to win Leading Drama Actor Emmy Awards for portraying the same character (Alan Shore) on two different series (The Practice (1997) and Boston Legal (2004)).
  • Has English, as well as smaller amounts of Scottish, French, Dutch, German, and Swiss-German, ancestry. Many of his ancestral lines trace back to Colonial America of the 1600s. Among James’s famous ancestors are Laurent Clerc, an educator of the deaf, mathematician Nathaniel Bowditch, Revolutionary War general Joshua Babcock, and Paul Mascarene, a Lieutenant-Governor of Nova Scotia. James also shares a common “Vanderbilt” ancestor with famous businessman Cornelius Vanderbilt.
  • Has two unsuccessful television pilots, Diner (1983) and Starcrossed (1985), to his credit.
  • The birth date on the “Ten Most Wanted” poster for Raymond “Red” Reddington on The Blacklist (2013) in February 7, 1960, Spader’s actual birth date.
  • Has two sons: Sebastian Spader (born 1989) and Elijah Spader (born 1992).
  • His father died two weeks before he began production on Critical Care (1997).
  • Born on the same date (February 7, 1960) as Saturday Night Live (1975) “TV Fun House” writer/cartoonist Robert Smigel, best known as the voice of Triumph the insult comic dog from Late Night with Conan O’Brien (1993).
  • Greatly admires the work of Charles Laughton.
  • Fiancée Leslie Stefanson gave birth to his third son on August 31, 2008.

Personal Quotes by James Spader

Acting for me, is a passion, but it’s also a job, and I’ve always approached it as such. I have a certain manual-laborist view of acting. There’s no shame in taking a film because you need some money.

James Spader

Acting is easy and fun. You earn a lot of money, and you bang out with girls. The profession is given tremendous significance within our society, but it’s not really worthy of it.

James Spader

If you find great difficulty in trying to reckon with the future or even the present, I think it’s intuitive to start that process by reckoning with the past.

James Spader

I didn’t really look like a character actor, yet those were the roles I loved to play. If you were a character actor who didn’t necessarily look like a character actor, you had to play bad guys.

James Spader

The script is the coloring book that you’re given, and your job is to figure out how to color it in. And also when and where to color outside the lines.

James Spader