Martin Sheen makes the effort of watching and thinking visible. We rate him most highly in Apocalypse Now, where his contained performance holds our attention even when the film threatens to overwhelm us.
Fi1m perspective
In Apocalypse Now (1979), Martin Sheen’s Captain Benjamin Willard looks as though paying attention has become exhausting. He keeps the performance contained while Francis Ford Coppola gives him more than enough to react to. We found that restraint unsettling: the strain is visible, but Sheen offers little of the relief that a large, emphatic response might provide. We rate him most highly here, letting us watch a man think without insisting that we understand him.
His breakthrough in Badlands (1973) was as Kit Carruthers, a charismatic killer on the run, rather than the reassuring authority figure he would so often become. Supporting work in Wall Street (1987), as Carl Fox, preceded the long television run as President Josiah Bartlet in The West Wing (1999–2006). Those parts can encourage us to forget how dangerous his screen presence could be. His officers and presidents work because he allows their vulnerability to show; certainty alone would make them less interesting.
Coppola makes good use of the contrast with Robert Duvall’s Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore, whose certainty is both funny and alarming. Duvall makes the officer’s confidence convincing enough that the humour cannot make him harmless. Sheen gives the film a quieter performance to return to, without trying to soften what surrounds him. Our reservation is with Coppola’s later stretches, which sometimes labour over ideas the fighting has already made clear. Sheen is right not to compete with the scale of it.
There is a risk in being cast so often as a moral centre: we can start trusting the actor before the character has earned it. The vulnerability in his Bartlet helps, but we would resist treating dependable authority as the whole of his appeal. His later work includes Thomas Avery in The Way (2010), directed by Emilio Estevez, extending a career that has kept moving between film and television. For the clearest reason to seek him out, start with Apocalypse Now and allow for the discomfort.
Biography
Martin Sheen, born Ramón Antonio Gerardo Estévez, is an American actor. He was born on 3 August 1940 in Dayton, Ohio, to a Spanish father and an Irish mother. Sheen began his career in New York theatre and made his Broadway debut in The Subject Was Roses (1964), later appearing in the 1968 film adaptation.
Sheen is known for his leading role as Captain Benjamin Willard in Apocalypse Now (1979) and as President Josiah Bartlet in the television series The West Wing (1999–2006). He has appeared in films including Badlands (1973), Gandhi (1982), Catch Me If You Can (2002) and The Departed (2006). Sheen has received a Golden Globe Award and two Screen Actors Guild Awards for The West Wing, an Emmy Award for a guest role in Murphy Brown, and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1989. He is the father of actors Emilio Estevez, Charlie Sheen, Ramón Estevez and Renée Estevez.
