Malkovich was born in Christopher, Illinois, on December 9, 1953. He grew up in Benton, Illinois. His father, Daniel Leon Malkovich, was a state conservation director, who published the conservation magazine Outdoor Illinois. His mother, Joe Anne (née Choisser), owned the Benton Evening News daily newspaper and Outdoor Illinois.[2][3][4] He grew up with an older brother, Danny, and three younger sisters, Amanda, Rebecca, and Melissa. In a May 2020 interview, he revealed that Melissa is his only surviving sibling.[5][6][7] His paternal grandparents were Croatian immigrants from the vicinity of Ozalj;[8][9][10][11] his other ancestry includes English, Scottish, French, and German descent. Malkovich attended Logan Grade School, Webster Junior High School, and Benton Consolidated High School. During his high-school years, he appeared in various plays and the musical Carousel. He was also active in a folk gospel group, with whom he sang at churches and community events. As a member of a local summer theater project, he co-starred in Jean-Claude van Itallie's America Hurrah in 1972.
He returned to theatre, directing Good Canary in Spanish in Mexico, then in English at the Rose Theater in London in 2016. Ilan Goodman, Harry Lloyd, and Freya Mavor were in the cast. Malkovich won the Milton Schulman Award for the best director at the Evening Standard Theater Awards in 2016.[32][33] He appeared in Just Call Me God in Hamburg in March 2017.[15] Malkovich wrote and starred in a movie called 100 Years (2016), directed by Robert Rodriguez. The movie is locked in a vault in the south of France, not to be seen before 2115.[34]
Malkovich has collaborated with Lithuanian actress Ingeborga Dapkūnaitė on many productions; by April 2023, there had been nine, and he has called her his "oldest, closest, colleague".[39] In 1992[40] they both appeared in the Steppenwolf production of A Slip of the Tongue,[39] which later played in Shaftesbury Avenue in London, directed by Simon Stokes.[41][15] She also appeared in Libra, a play directed and adapted by Malkovich about Lee Harvey Oswald,[40] and, in January 2011, she appeared with him in The Giacomo Variations at the Sydney Opera House, as part of the Sydney Festival.[42][15] In April 2023, Dapkūnaitė acted alongside Malkovich in In the Solitude of Cotton Fields in Tallinn, Estonia.[39]
Malkovich created his own fashion company, Mrs. Mudd, in 2002.[43] The company released its John Malkovich menswear collection, "Uncle Kimono", in 2003,[44] which was subsequently covered in the international press,[45] and its second clothing line, "Technobohemian", in 2011.[46] Malkovich designed the outfits himself.[47] In an interview with Big Issue in 2024, Malkovich said that he "stopped doing fashion about six, seven years ago" but still enjoys seeing collections by "the great fabric designers".[43]
In 2008, directed by Austrian director Michael Sturminger, he portrayed the story of Jack Unterweger in a performance for one actor, two sopranos, and period orchestra entitled Seduction and Despair, which premiered at Barnum Hall in Santa Monica, California.[49] A fully staged version of the production, entitled The Infernal Comedy premiered in Vienna in July 2009. The show has since been performed in 2009 through 2012 throughout Europe, North America and South America.[50]
Malkovich was also directed by Sturminger in Casanova's Variations and its movie adaptation in 2014 (co-starring Fanny Ardant).[51] For their third collaboration, in 2017, Michael Stürminger directed Malkovich in Just Call me God – the final speech, in which he played a Third World dictator called Satur Dinam Cha, who is about to be overthrown.[52]
In 2014, the photographer Sandro Miller recreated 35 iconic portraits of John Malkovich as the subject, in a project called Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich: Homage to Photographer Master.[54]
Malkovich married actress Glenne Headly in 1982. In 1988, the couple divorced following his affair with Michelle Pfeiffer.[57][58] He began dating Nicoletta Peyran in 1989 after meeting her on the set of The Sheltering Sky, on which she was the second assistant director. The couple have two children, Amandine and Loewy.[59]
Malkovich has a distinctive voice quality, which The Guardian has described as "wafting, whispery, and reedy".[59] He does not consider himself a method actor.[60] Malkovich is fluent in French, having lived and worked in theater in southern France for nearly 10 years. He and his family left France in a dispute over taxes in 2003[61] and have since lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts.[62]
Malkovich is the co-owner of the restaurant Bica do Sapato and Lux nightclub in Lisbon.[63] He lost millions of dollars in the Madoff investment scandal in 2008.[64][65] In the 1990s, Malkovich and Peyran bought a farm near Lacoste, Vaucluse,[9] which the couple later turned into a wine label named Les Quelles de la Coste; they started planting grapevines there in 2008[66] and produced their first vintage in 2011.[67][68] He has raised funds for the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, his sole charity.[69]
Malkovich stated in a 2011 interview that he is not a "political person" and that he does not have "an ideology", revealing that he had not voted since George McGovern lost his presidential run in 1972.[70] At the Cambridge Union Society in 2002, when asked whom he would most like to fight to the death, Malkovich replied that he would "rather just shoot" journalist Robert Fisk and politician George Galloway, stating that Galloway was not honest. Journalists speculated that the comment was related to criticism of Israel and the war in Iraq.[71][72]
When asked in an interview with the Toronto Star in 2008 whether having spiritual beliefs was necessary to portray a spiritual character, he said, "No, I'd say not... I'm an atheist. I wouldn't say I'm without spiritual belief particularly, or rather, specifically. Maybe I'm agnostic, but I'm not quite sure there's some great creator somehow controlling everything and giving us free will. I don't know; it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to me."[73]
On June 6, 2013, Malkovich was walking in Toronto when a 77-year-old man named Jim Walpole tripped and accidentally cut his throat on a piece of scaffolding. Malkovich applied pressure to Walpole's neck to reduce bleeding before Walpole was rushed to a hospital, where he received stitches and later credited Malkovich with saving his life.[74][75]
^"Being John Malkovich". The Age. April 26, 2003. Archived from the original on October 16, 2015. Retrieved November 6, 2015. I think we were like that because we are Croats (on his father's side).
^ abLam, Sophie (March 20, 2015). "John Malkovich: My life in travel". The Independent. Archived from the original on March 29, 2019. Retrieved November 18, 2018. My grandparents were Croatian. I have been there several times and I like it, but I don't know it well, only Zagreb.
^"Croatian Art". Croatianhistory.net. September 2, 1995. Archived from the original on December 18, 2008. Retrieved December 22, 2008.
^Kralev, Nicholas (June 15, 2002). "Seeing John Malkovich"(reprint). NicholasKralev.com. Archived from the original on August 23, 2011. Retrieved December 22, 2008. Even though of Croatian and Scottish descent, Malkovich had a relatively typical Midwestern upbringing in the small Illinois town of Benton, some 300 miles south of Chicago.
^Lane, Anthony (February 16, 2004). "The Creepiest". Vanity Fair. New York City. Archived from the original on August 3, 2017. Retrieved March 30, 2019.
^Orlova-Alvarez, Tamara; Alvarez, Joe (January 30, 2019). "John Malkovich Is Coming To West End". Ikon London Magazine. Archived from the original on January 30, 2019. Retrieved January 30, 2019.
^ abWood, Gaby (September 30, 2001). "A multitude of Malkovich". The Guardian. London, UK. Archived from the original on September 30, 2013. Retrieved April 25, 2010.
^Barber, Lynn (September 7, 2006). "Life and taxes". The Guardian. London, UK. Archived from the original on January 19, 2008. Retrieved July 14, 2011.