John Goodman, in full John Stephen Goodman (born June 20, 1952, Affton, Missouri, U.S.), American actor who is perhaps best known for his long-running role as Dan Conner in the television series Roseanne (1988–97). His imposing physical stature often garnered him movie roles playing over-the-top, larger-than-life figures.
Goodman attended Southwest Missouri State University on a football scholarship. An injury, however, ended his chances of a football career, and he began studying drama. After graduating in 1975, he moved to New York City to pursue acting jobs. He took roles in tiny dinner theatres and in television commercials before being cast in the Broadway production of Loose Ends in 1979. A few years later he again performed on Broadway in Big River (1985) as Huck Finn’s father, the role for which he first received critical attention. Goodman began to regularly appear in films in the early 1980s, and in 1987 he played an escaped convict in the Coen brothers’ quirky comedy Raising Arizona. His breakthrough, however, came when he was cast as the all-American blue-collar family man in the hit comedy television series Roseanne. His performances in this role earned him seven Emmy Award nominations and a Golden Globe Award (1993).
During his successful stint on Roseanne, Goodman’s movie career also began to take off. He played the husband of a comedian in Punchline (1988) and a pilot who fights forest fires opposite Richard Dreyfuss in Always (1989). In the 1990s Goodman appeared in more than 20 movies, including The Babe (1992), in which he starred as baseball legend Babe Ruth, and The Flintstones (1994), a remake of the classic cartoon. He also reteamed with the Coen brothers for Barton Fink (1991); The Big Lebowski (1998), in which he portrayed a Vietnam War veteran still reliving the past; and O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), starring opposite George Clooney as a crooked Bible salesman in 1930s Mississippi.
Goodman played a father who is nervous about his daughter’s move to New York City in Coyote Ugly (2000) and a detective in One Night at McCool’s (2001). Subsequent supporting roles include the manager of singer Bobby Darin in the biopic Beyond the Sea (2004), a corrupt congressman in the comedy Evan Almighty (2007), and a baseball executive in the drama Trouble with the Curve (2012). Goodman also appeared in two consecutive winners of the Academy Award for best picture, both times as Hollywood industry figures; he portrayed a studio mogul in The Artist (2011) and a real-life makeup artist enlisted in a CIA operation in Argo (2012). In 2013 he was featured as a villainous mobster in the freewheeling comedy The Hangover Part III and as a caustic heroin-addicted jazz musician in the Coen Brothers’ drama Inside Llewyn Davis. He then costarred in The Monuments Men (2014), which fictionalized Allied efforts to recover art stolen by the Nazis during World War II, and in The Gambler (2014), a remake of a 1974 drama about a man with a gambling problem. In addition, Goodman’s easily recognizable voice could be heard in numerous animated films, among them The Emperor’s New Groove (2000), Bee Movie (2007), and The Princess and the Frog (2009), as well as the Pixar hit Monsters, Inc. (2001) and its sequel Monsters University (2013).
Goodman continued to appear on television in the 21st century. He starred in the sitcom Center of the Universe (2004–05) and provided the voice of a lion in the animated Father of the Pride (2004–05). In 2010 he began appearing on the HBO series Treme, a drama set in New Orleans shortly after Hurricane Katrina, and the following year he joined the cast of the legal drama Damages. Goodman also had a featured role in the HBO television movie You Don’t Know Jack (2010), which centred on Dr. Jack Kevorkian, a vocal supporter of physician-assisted suicide. He returned to Broadway in a 2009 production of Waiting for Godot.
