Tobey Maguire(1975–)

Tobias Vincent Maguire was born at Santa Monica in California on the twenty-seventh of June 1975, only child of Vincent Maguire, a cook of Irish-Catholic descent from the County Tyrone Maguires, and Wendy Brown, a secretary turned screenwriter. The parents separated when Tobey was small; he was raised partly at his mother's various Los Angeles County addresses and partly with his grandmother at Vallejo in northern California, dropped out of high school at sixteen to take auditions full-time, and through his late teens worked at small television-guest-actor roles on the long-running series Roseanne, Walker, Texas Ranger, Blossom and the Adam Sandler picture Brain Donors.

He took his first leading role in Ang Lee's adaptation of The Ice Storm (1997), playing the older brother Paul Hood in the Connecticut suburban drama of the early 1970s. The performance brought him into the front rank of the younger Hollywood character-actor generation, and through 1998 to 2001 he worked with the leading American directors of the period: Ang Lee on The Ice Storm (1997), Woody Allen on Deconstructing Harry (1997), Lasse Hallström on The Cider House Rules (1999, the film adaptation of John Irving's novel for which Michael Caine took the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor), Curtis Hanson on Wonder Boys (2000), Gary Ross on Pleasantville (1998) and the eventual Seabiscuit (2003, the horse-racing biopic on the Depression-era thoroughbred Seabiscuit and his jockey Red Pollard, the role for which Maguire took the Screen Actors Guild ensemble nomination).

He was cast as Peter Parker / Spider-Man by the Sam Raimi production team in 2000 for the long-developed Marvel film adaptation, on the strength of his ability to project both the diffidence of the high-school Peter Parker and the gravitas of the costumed Spider-Man. Spider-Man (2002, directed by Raimi, with Kirsten Dunst as Mary Jane Watson) was the highest-grossing US-domestic theatrical film of the year at four hundred and seven million dollars, the second-highest-grossing worldwide at over eight hundred and twenty million dollars, and the foundational text of the modern Marvel-superhero film genre that has dominated Hollywood box-office through the next two decades. Maguire reprised the role in Spider-Man 2 (2004, the second-highest-grossing US film of the year, on the strength of Alfred Molina's Doctor Octopus performance and the train-rescue sequence) and Spider-Man 3 (2007), the three films grossing collectively over two and a half billion dollars worldwide.

He took the leading role in Ed Zwick's Brothers (2009, the Iraq-war family drama opposite Natalie Portman and Jake Gyllenhaal), in Baz Luhrmann's adaptation of The Great Gatsby (2013, playing the narrator Nick Carraway opposite Leonardo DiCaprio's Gatsby), and in the science-fiction drama Pawn Sacrifice (2014, playing the chess-grandmaster Bobby Fischer in the 1972 World Chess Championship at Reykjavik against Boris Spassky). He returned briefly to the Spider-Man role in Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021), the Marvel multiverse production that brought the three live-action Spider-Man actors together on screen. He continues to work selectively in production and acting. The Maguire name in modern American cinema carries the weight of the Sam Raimi Spider-Man trilogy.