Actor. Born Kevin Fowler, on July 26, 1959, in South Orange, New Jersey. He was the youngest of three children; his father wrote technical procedures and his mother was a private secretary. The family moved frequently and in 1963, they settled in Los Angeles, where young Kevin proceeded to become a self-described, “little terror.” After he burned down his sister’s treehouse, Kevin’s parents decided to enforce some extra discipline, and sent him to California’s Northridge Military Academy. He promptly won a leadership award, then got expelled for clobbering a fellow student with a tire during a boxing match. He then enrolled at the Chatsworth High School, where a teacher encouraged him to put his energy into acting. The strategy worked, and Kevin appeared in several theater productions, and also tried the comedy club circuit, doing impressions. He graduated from Chatworth High School as co-valedictorian with Mare Winningham. After briefly attending Los Angeles Valley College, Spacey transferred to the drama program at The Juilliard School of the Performing Arts in New York City, upon the encouragement of fellow actor and Chatworth classmate, Val Kilmer. He stayed in the program for two years, then dropped out in 1981, convinced he could tackle New York’s theater scene without a diploma. He joined the New York Shakespeare Festival and appeared as a messenger and a rock in Henry IV Part One. He later commented, “I was a very…solid rock.”

Over the next five years, Spacey appeared in several regional stage productions including the summer theater festival in Williamstown, Massachusetts, the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and the Seattle Repertory Theater. In 1982, just a year after quitting Juilliard, Spacey made his Broadway debut as Oswald in Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts, alongside Liv Ullman. After impressing director Mike Nichols for his work in David Rabe’s Hurlybulry, Spacey became the understudy for all the male roles in his productions. In 1986, he played Jamie Tyrone, alongside Jack Lemmon, in a critically acclaimed production of Long Day’s Journey into the Night, which brought him to the forefront of the New York theater world. Having secured a comfortable notoriety for his stage work, Spacey decided to brave the ever fickle and shifty film and television scene in Los Angeles.