| Biography |
A handsome, versatile character actor, Jon Hamm got his first taste of acting celebrity at the age of six, when he was cast as Winnie the Pooh in his first grade class play. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1971, Jon lost his mother when he was ten and his father followed ten years later. Inheriting a trust from his late mother, Jon attended the John Burroughs School, a prestigious private prep academy. After graduating with an English degree from the University of Missouri in Columbia, Jon returned to the Burroughs School to teach; he got the job and for the next year he worked at the school as a faculty drama teacher. Moving out to L.A. in the 1990s, Hamm suffered through a three year lull before work started rolling in. After a couple of unsuccessful pilots, Hamm caught his big break in 2000, landing a semi-regular role as romantic firefighter Burt Ridley, on “Providence”. That led to Hamm’s next engagement, a two-season gig as Police Inspector Nate Basso on “The Division”. From there, it was a steady domino-effect of employment. Over the next few years, Jon popped up as a guest-star on a number of hit series. A successful six-episode recurring arc on the short-lived ABC dramedy “What About Brian” led Jon to another comfortable semi-regular gig on the Emmy-nominated espionage-drama, “The Unit”. In 2007, Jon was tapped by Matthew Weiner, a former writer-producer for “The Sopranos,” to star in his new cable series “Mad Men,” which is in its second season of production. For his role of 1960s Madison Avenue advertising executive Don Draper in the AMC series, he won the 2008 Golden Globe Award for best performance by an actor in a drama series. On the big screen Jon had a showy role as Captain Matt Dillon in the 2002 war epic “We Were Soldiers.” His best known feature work, however, is probably his supporting turn in the 2002 romantic-comedy “Kissing Jessica Stein,” in which he played Charles, a hapless would-be suitor for the title character – played coincidentally by the actor’s real-life longtime girlfriend, Jennifer Westfeldt. Off Broadway and regional theater credits include: “A Midsummer Night's Dream”, “Lipschtick” (which would later become the film “Kissing Jessica Stein”) and “The Mousetrap." Jon will also appear in the movies “The Day the Earth Stood Still” and “The Boy in the Box”, both scheduled for release in 2008. He lives in Los Angeles with his girlfriend, Jennifer Westfeldt, and his dog. |