Biography for
Alessandro Nivola More at IMDbPro »

Date of Birth

28 June 1972, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

Birth Name

Alessandro Antine Nivola

Nickname

Sandro

Height

5' 9" (1.75 m)

Spouse

Emily Mortimer

(3 January 2003 - present) 1 child

Trivia

Dated actress Rachel Weisz.

Educated at Yale University and received his degree in English.

Attended Phillips Exeter Academy high school.

Received a B.A. in English Literature from Yale University, Class of 1994.

Older brother of Adrian Nivola, who also went to Yale

Son, Sam Nivola, was born September 26, 2003, with Emily Mortimer.

His father, Pietro, is a senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC.

Also a fine football (soccer for Americans) player and represented the "Rest of the World" in a charity match against England. The charity Unicef was the beneficiary. Other players included celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay, sprinter Ben Johnson, Patrick Keilty, Brian McFadden and ex Formula 1 driver Eddie Irvine (all RotW) and Robbie Williams, Jonathan Wilkes, David Grey, Ronnie O'Sullivan and Angus Deaton (England)

Son-in-law of writer John Mortimer.

He and actress Embeth Davidtz played brother and sister in Mansfield Park (1999) and husband and wife in Junebug (2005).

Is a huge soccer fan.

Played in bands all through high school and college.

Personal Quotes

One of the pleasures of being an actor, is kind of getting out of yourself and trying to stretch and reshape yourself into someone else that's had a very different kind of experience. Obviously you bring whatever you know about life and about the way that people behave and everything to a performance.

(On indie vs. mainstream films) The only thing is that on a small movie you don't have to wait around very long to shoot your scenes but then when you shoot them, they don't spend very much time with them. On a big movie, you wait for hours and days to actually do your bit but then when it comes, with some exceptions, you tend to be able to spend more time doing it and over it. And I don't know, I tend to get better as I go along, whereas some people sort of hit their first takes and they get worse from there.

(On his role in Face/Off) At the time, I was obsessing over a documentary about Robert Crumb [Crumb, 1994]. He had this brother named Charles, who's in the movie, and I stole his voice. I played a tape of the film for Nicolas Cage, and he said [imitating Cage], 'Ah, yeah... errrr ... very dark. I like it.' Nic had a really big impact on me. It was my first film - I'd never been to L.A., or anything. He really urged me on and gave me the confidence to be daring.

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