Jon Voight, the Midnight Cowboy Who Took Hollywood’s Case to Washington

Jon Voight

Photo: Toglenn / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	December 29, 1938 Yonkers, New York, United States
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Heat, Mission: Impossible
Awards	Academy Award · Cannes Film Festival Best Actor · BAFTA · 3 Golden Globe · National Medal of Arts

The most talked-about thing Jon Voight did this month happened in a congressional press release. A bill to give film and television productions a federal tax credit for keeping their work in the United States, one he had spent more than a year pressing on the White House, finally reached Congress with his statement attached. He is the actor who once played Joe Buck, the Texas dishwasher who rides a bus to Manhattan in a cowboy hat, and Luke Martin, the paralyzed veteran who tells a room of high-school boys that the war is not what they have been sold. He spent his youth on one side of America’s arguments and his old age on the other, and he has never been quiet in either.

Voight grew up in Yonkers, just north of New York City, one of three sons of Elmer Voight, a professional golfer whose family name had been Voytka, and Barbara Kamp. His younger brother James Wesley became the songwriter Chip Taylor, author of “Wild Thing”, and died in March of this year at eighty-six.

A Catholic education ran from Archbishop Stepinac High School in White Plains to the Catholic University of America in Washington, where Voight, born on December 29, 1938, majored in art and graduated in 1960. He then trained at the Neighborhood Playhouse under Sanford Meisner, and his Broadway debut came in 1961 as Rolf, the telegram boy in The Sound of Music. He married Lauri Peters, a member of that cast, the following year.

The break was Midnight Cowboy. John Schlesinger’s film, released in 1969 with an X rating, paired Voight’s Joe Buck with Dustin Hoffman’s Ratso Rizzo and became the only X-rated film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Both actors were nominated for Best Actor and both lost to John Wayne. Voight then went canoeing into John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972) alongside Burt Reynolds and Ned Beatty and played an idealistic teacher on a South Carolina island in Martin Ritt’s Conrack.

The peak came with Hal Ashby’s Coming Home (1978). As Luke Martin, a paraplegic veteran who falls for Jane Fonda’s military wife, Voight won the Best Actor award at Cannes and then the Academy Award. The early 1980s were a detour: he lost the lead in John Cassavetes’ Love Streams, after announcing a few weeks before shooting that he also wanted to direct it. The recovery was Runaway Train (1985), Andrei Konchalovsky’s thriller from a story by Akira Kurosawa, in which his escaped convict Manny earned a third Best Actor nomination and a Golden Globe.

From the mid-1990s Voight turned into one of Hollywood’s most employable character actors. He was the fence in Michael Mann‘s Heat (1995) and the treacherous spymaster Jim Phelps in Brian De Palma‘s Mission: Impossible (1996). In 2001 he played Franklin D. Roosevelt in Pearl Harbor, Lord Croft opposite his daughter Angelina Jolie in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Ben Stiller’s coal-miner father in Zoolander, and Howard Cosell, all but unrecognizable under the toupee, in Mann’s Ali, which brought his fourth Oscar nomination. National Treasure and Transformers followed.

The same decades rewrote his public identity. In the early 1970s Voight had protested the Vietnam War and registered voters for George McGovern’s campaign alongside Jane Fonda. In a 2008 opinion piece for The Washington Times he wrote that he regretted that activism and called the peace movement of his youth the product of Marxist propaganda. He endorsed Mitt Romney in 2012 and Donald Trump in 2016, received the National Medal of Arts in 2019, and after the 2020 election released a video implying that Joe Biden’s victory had been fraudulent. The turn stands out among Hollywood’s political conversions because his two defining performances were anti-war and anti-establishment to the bone, and he has disowned the politics that shaped them without ever disowning the films. Anyone returning to Joe Buck and Luke Martin now has to hold both men in view. His filmography reflects the shift too: after Ray Donovan, much of his screen time has gone to small independent productions with a faith-based or conservative bent, work that rarely reaches the audiences who remember his best films.

Ray Donovan showed how much he still had. As Mickey Donovan, the charming, dangerous ex-convict father of Liev Schreiber’s Hollywood fixer, he stole scenes for seven seasons on Showtime from 2013, won a Golden Globe in 2014 and collected two Emmy nominations, then returned for Ray Donovan: The Movie in 2022. Francis Ford Coppola cast him in Megalopolis (2024) as the banker Hamilton Crassus III, and that same year he narrated Reagan as a retired KGB agent. In March 2026 he appeared in Bryan Singer’s Monument as Yacov Rechter, an Israeli architect asked to design a memorial to fallen soldiers while his son, played by Joseph Mazzello, argues for one that honors the dead on all sides. It opened in a handful of theaters with almost no publicity.

Politics also reached his family. He married Marcheline Bertrand in 1971; they separated in 1976 and the divorce was finalized in 1980. Their children, James Haven and Angelina Jolie, both went into film. Voight’s relationship with Jolie has moved through public estrangements and partial reconciliations for two decades, and in November 2023 he publicly criticized her statements on the war in Gaza, where she had called for a ceasefire.

His current job has no call sheet. In January 2025 Trump named him a Special Ambassador to Hollywood alongside Mel Gibson and Sylvester Stallone, and by that spring he was the only one of the three holding meetings with the studios and the guilds about production fleeing abroad. With the producer Steven Paul, he lobbied the White House for a federal incentive until Trump publicly endorsed it this month. On September 24 a bipartisan group of senators and representatives, with Tim Scott and Adam Schiff sponsoring in the Senate, introduced the Motion Picture, Television, and Entertainment Revitalization Act, a 20 percent credit on American labor costs that can rise to 30 percent. In the statement released with the bill, Voight said the act would “restore the American film and television industry, put crews back to work”.

He turns 88 in December. The Last Firefighter, a drama from Sean McNamara in which he stars opposite Kelsey Grammer, wrapped in Los Angeles last year and still has no release date, while the bill now has to make its way through committee. Whether it passes will decide how his final chapter is read: as a political sideline, or as the most practical thing the industry ever got from one of its most divisive stars.