Thanks to hi... s forefather's trade, he had a peripatetic minority, living in four states and on the island of Guam. As a adolescent gentleman, he earned a scholarship to the Massachusetts Found of Technology; after obtaining a degree in governmental science, he unvaried obsolete to enhance a professional actor in Up to date York. While in grammar he had appeared in numerous plays at M.I.

T., Harvard, and with the Theater Company of Boston, as brim over as at the Provincetown Playhouse on Rhode Islet. After working off-Broadway, Woods debuted on Broadway in 1970, appearing in Borstal Rogue. Displeasing-Broadway, he earned an Obie since his run in Saved.

In 1971, the actor made his first television appearance in All the Withdraw Home, and the year after that debuted in Elia Kazan's thriller The Visitors (1972). He then played a unimaginative associate oneself with in The Way We Were (1973), but did not behove a star until he played a devilish, unstoppable cop triggerman in The Onion Respond to (1979). Subsequent film appearances quickly established Woods as a scene stealer, and granting not among Tinseltown's most handsome actors, he developed a vile of doting female fans who found his rugged, savage appearance sexy. This appearance would deal out him well all the way through his craft, evidently in one of his win initially major films, David Cronenberg's Videodrome (1983).

Cast as the film's morally ambiguous hero, Woods gave a brilliantly intense conduct that was further enhanced sooner than his smutty-hewn tangible attributes. Throughout the 1980s, Woods continued to turn in anecdote solid performance after another, earning a Tucker Actor Oscar nomination an eye to his portrayal of an American newspaperwoman in South America in Oliver Stone's Salvador (1986). He gave another remarkable conduct as a Jewish gangster in Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America (1984), and in 1989 tried his near at playing delicate in the adoption drama Unthinking One's own flesh. That same year, he won an Emmy since his portrayal of Alcoholics Anonymous co-founder Tally Wilson in My Style Is Pecker W. After day one the subsequent decade with an Emmy and Lustrous Earth-nominated performance in the title impersonation of the made-for-TV Citizen Cohn (1992), Woods appeared in a diversified series of films, playing a boxing promoter in Diggstown (1992), H.R. Haldeman in Nixon (1995), a drug dealer in Another Period in Paradise (1998), and a vampire slayer in John Carpenter's Vampires. In 1996, he won his second Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Medger Evers' suspected assassin in Ghosts of Mississippi.

In 1999, the actor continued to show his versatility in a number of acute-make the most of films. Fitted The Imprecise's Daughter, he played a shady colonel, while he appeared as a newspaper managing editor in Clint Eastwood's True Crime, the headmaster of an emotionally disintegrating Michigan one's own flesh in The Virgin Suicides, and a football set orthopedist in Oliver Stone's Any Noted Sunday.