Born July 26, 1959 in South Orange, NJ, Spacey was raised from an early age in and around Los Angeles by his father, Thomas, an oft-unemployed technical writer, and his mother, Kathleen, a secretary. Though his parents were strict, Spacey was rebellious; even destructive – he burned down his sister’s tree house in the backyard of his family’s Malibu home and was later expelled from the Northridge Military Academy for hitting a fellow student with a tire. He moved on to Chatsworth High School, where he discovered theater and acted alongside fellow classmate and future actors, Val Kilmer and Mare Winningham. After graduating, he tried his hand at stand-up comedy, even trying out for “The Gong Show” (1975-1980), but failed to make the cut. He then followed Kilmer to the dramatic program at the Julliard School in Manhattan, where he managed to stick around for only two of the required four years. Spacey occasionally landed small roles on small stages, while working as a shoe salesman and a building superintendent to pay the bills. At the beginning Spacey’s career was decidedly hard-fought.

Spacey was doing office work at Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival when the festival director saw him in an off-off-Broadway play and told him he should be acting, not pushing pencils. He soon landed the role of a soldier in the company's production of "Henry VI, Part I" (1981). Other roles soon followed and Papp one day “fired” the office worker so he would be free to find employment as an actor. It was not long until Spacey made his Broadway debut opposite Liv Ullman in "Ghosts" (1982), effectively launching his stage career. After appearing in regional theater, Spacey auditioned for the national touring company of "The Real Thing," but director Mike Nichols instead suggested he try for a role in another one of his productions, "Hurlyburly.” After serving as the understudy for the role of Mickey – which was played by Harvey Keitel – Spacey was the standby for two of the other male roles in the same play. Nichols later gave the actor his first onscreen break as a subway rider who mugs Meryl Streep's Rachel in "Heartburn" (1986), then later cast him as a Wall Street broker in "Working Girl" (1989).

In between his two parts, Spacey earned plaudits – though he was the only cast member passed over for a Tony Award nomination – playing Jamie Tyrone in Eugene O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey Into Night" (1986), a part he landed thanks to stealing a cocktail party invitation from an old woman falling asleep next to him at a lecture given by the play’s director, Jonathan Miller. Spacey sauntered into the party, sat next to Miller and described his months of difficulty getting an audition. Two days later, Spacey scored an audition and eventually landed the part. After calling upon his background as a stand-up comic for "Rocket Gibralter" (1988), Spacey was cast as the lecherous, heroin-addicted multi-millionaire villain Mel Profitt in the cult favorite drama, "Wiseguy.” Spacey continued the television trend, appearing in the miniseries "The Murder of Mary Phagan" (NBC, 1988), which he followed with a return to features with the maudlin "Dad" (1988). As the 1990s dawned, he delivered a dazzling starring turn as disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker in "Fall From Grace" (NBC, 1990), then performed admirably as renowned attorney Clarence Darrow in “Darrow” (PBS, 1991). Both roles preceded his Tony-winning featured performance as a gangster wannabe in Neil Simon's nostalgic play "Lost in Yonkers" (1991), which cemented his status as an exceptional stage performer capable of making the transition to the big screen.

Despite wide exposure from his television and film work, it was his stage performances that helped propel him down a path of critically acclaimed films that eventually vaulted him atop the Hollywood A-list. Al Pacino had been an audience member at "Lost in Yonkers" and came away duly impressed with Spacey’s performance, lobbying for Spacey to be cast to as Mr. Williamson, the put-upon manager of an office full of deadbeat salesmen in David Mamet’s "Glengarry Glen Ross" (1992). So electric were the scenes between Spacey and the other actors – including Pacino, Ed Harris, Alan Arkin and mentor Jack Lemmon – that Spacey felt beaten down from all the yelling and cursing hurled his way. Later that same year, he visited a suburbia riddled with dark secrets for the first time in Alan Pakula's not entirely successful tale of wife swapping and murder, "Consenting Adults" (1992). Spacey starred in the underrated black comedy "The Ref" (1994) which paired him with the equally formidable Judy Davis as battling spouses whose home is burglarized by a gunman (Denis Leary) who holds them hostage and forces them to reconcile their differences for the sake of his diminishing sanity.

Spacey continued tackling character-centered roles in small films that he helped amplify with his strong, intense performances. In "Swimming With Sharks" (1994) – on which he also served as a co-producer – Spacey let it fly as an abusive Hollywood studio executive who is taken hostage by his lowly assistant (Frank Whaley) after he steals the recent film grad’s script idea. Hitting his stride as a variety of villainous characters, Spacey offered a chilling – and unbilled – turn in David Fincher's atmospheric "Seven" (1995), playing serial killer John Doe, who commits a series of bizarre and grisly murders based on the seven deadly sins. As the man who delivered Gwyneth Paltrow’s head in a box to her unsuspecting on-screen husband Brad Pitt, Spacey proved no one could do creepy as well as he could. On an unbelievable roll, he stole the show as the seemingly crippled con man, “Verbal” Kint, in "The Usual Suspects" (1995), one of the most talked about films of the 1990s, thanks to one simple question: Who is Keyser Söze? Despite stellar performances from Chazz Paleminteri, Stephen Baldwin, Benicio Del Toro and Gabriel Byrne, Spacey was again singled out by most critics for his intricate portrayal of the pathetic Kint, who narrates to a customs agent the story of a heist gone bad without giving away his ulterior motives. Spacey earned several award nominations and for his work as Kint, won the Academy Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role.

With his sudden rise to the top of his profession, Spacey began fielding offers for roles in more mainstream Hollywood fare. After playing a researcher at the Center for Disease Control in the unfortunate “Outbreak” (1995), Spacey essayed the role of a smugly crusading prosecutor in “A Time to Kill” (1996). Like many successful performers, Spacey had an itch to direct. So he stepped behind the cameras for "Albino Alligator" (1997), a character-driven thriller about three petty crooks mistaken for big-time bank robbers. While Spacey had much to learn about camera placement and movement, he clearly knew how to deal with actors, eliciting fine work from Gary Sinise, Matt Dillon and Viggo Mortensen. Returning to his stock in trade, Spacey delivered one of his finest screen performances as the smarmy celebrity cop Jack Vincennes in "L.A. Confidential" (1997), Curtis Hanson’s brilliant adaptation of James Ellroy’s serpentine novel about crime and corruption on both sides of the law in 1950s Los Angeles. In fact, critics considered his death scene a marvel for the way he literally did not move a muscle once shot dead, holding the shot for well over 15 seconds, eyes wide open. Similarly his portrayal of Jim Williams, the homosexual Savannah resident accused of murder in "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" (1997), allowed the actor to plumb the depths of an upstanding public citizen who succumbs to his darker impulses.

His successful turn as Jim Williams merely fueled speculation about his private life, which peaked with an October 1997 Esquire cover story by Tom Junod that intimated that the actor was, in fact, gay. The matter proved a double-edged sword for Spacey. He earned sympathy from those who felt the journalist and the magazine had crossed a line, but scorn from those who felt he should offer comments on his private life, and if indeed gay, “come out” already. Spacey later addressed the concerns in a 1999 Playboy interview, effectively denying the rumors. The profile, however, had zero effect on his career – Spacey took on a rare heroic role to play a cop who excels at excising hostages from their kidnappers in "The Negotiator" (1998). Paired with Samuel L. Jackson – who portrayed a good cop suspected of wrongdoings – Spacey proved a mesmerizin