The character actor of choice for directors like Spike Lee and the Coen Brothers, Turturro has appeared in nearly five dozen films over the past 25 years.

Born in Brooklyn and raised in Rosedale, Queens, a young Turturro majored in acting at SUNY New Paltz and won a scholarship to the Yale School of Drama. Turturro began his acting career in regional and off-Broadway theater, winning a 1984 Obie for his performance in John Patrick Shanley's Danny and The Deep Blue Sea. He paid the bills as a bartender and high school history teacher before earning a string of small roles in the mid- 1980s in films like Desperately Seeking Susan and The Color of Money. In 1989, Turturro finally won his first meaty screen role: Pino in Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing. Two years later, critics raved about his performance in the Coen brothers' Barton Fink, which earned him the award for Best Actor at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival. Since then, Turturro's played a range of characters of nearly every ethnicity, but he's probably best known, though, for his close association with Lee: they've worked together for more than half a dozen films.

In recent years, Turturro has also turned to directing, with films like Illuminata and Romance and Cigarettes and Broadway's Relatively Speaking. More recently, he appeared on the big screen in The Good Shepherd and Transformers. [Image via Getty]