The Biography Channel - Matthew McConaughey Biography

The co-star dating Texan hit the Hollywood big time in A Time To Kill, but was Dazed And Confused when he was arrested for pot possession and naked bongo playing.

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Matthew McConaughey
born: 04-11-1969
birth place: Uvalde, Texas, USA

Matthew McConaughey was raised in Longview, Texas, the son of Mary Kathleen McCabe, a substitute teacher and James Donald McConaughey, a former American football player for the Green Bay Packers. He excelled in sports as a high school student and was voted "Most Handsome" by his senior class. After graduating, McConaughey spent some time working in Australia before returning to the United States to attend the University of Texas at Austin, where he graduated in 1993 with a degree in film production. Having met producer and casting director Don Phillips, who introduced him to director Richard Linklater, McConaughey was cast in ‘Dazed and Confused’ (1993) straight out of university.

After ‘Dazed and Confused’, he took on a number of supporting roles in films of varying quality, until being given his first leading role in Joel Schumacher's adaptation of John Grisham's ‘A Time to Kill’ (1996), apparently beating out Brad Pitt, Val Kilmer and Woody Harrelson to secure the role. Although the film met with mixed reviews, Matthew escaped the critical mauling relatively unscathed.

His appearance on the cover of the August 1996 issue of Vanity Fair secured his status as 'The Next Big Thing', but he failed to capitalise upon this momentum, a fact which has characterised his career path. A string of small, largely unseen films followed before he landed a starring role as a property lawyer in ‘Amistad’ (1997), Steven Spielberg's slave epic. Robert Zemeckis’ ‘Contact’ (1997) followed, before he again collaborated with Linklater in 1998 on ‘The Newton Boys’ (1998) alongside Ethan Hawke.