for: Chris Penn (American football)

Christopher Shannon "Chris" Penn (October 10, 1965 – January 24, 2006) was an American film and television actor.

Personal life

Penn was born in Los Angeles County, California, the son of Leo Penn, an actor and director, and Eileen Ryan (née Annucci), an actress. His paternal grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Lithuania and Russia,Jews Flop in Big Oscar Award Wins. Jewish Journal.com. March 5, 2004. and his mother was a Roman Catholic of Italian and Irish descent.Kelly, Richard T. Sean Penn: His Life and Times. Canongate U.S. 2004. ISBN 1841956236. According to Penn's mother, Leo Penn may have had distant Spanish ancestry, as the family's surname was originally "Piñón". He has two older brothers, actor Sean Penn, and musician Michael Penn. From 1993 to 1999, Penn dated and lived with Filipino-American model Steffiana de la Cruz.

Career

Penn started acting at the age of 12 at the Loft Studio and made his film debut in 1979's Charlie and the Talking Buzzard starring Christopher Hanks. In 1983, he was featured in Francis Ford Coppola's youth drama Rumble Fish and appeared in the high school football drama All the Right Moves as the best friend of Tom Cruise and a soon-to-be father. He also appeared in the hit dance movie Footloose in 1984, played a villain in the Clint Eastwood western Pale Rider (1985), and co-starred with his brother, Sean Penn, and mother Eileen Ryan in At Close Range (1986).

Penn was typically cast as a tough character, featured as a villain or a working-class lug, or in a comic role. Two of his more memorable performances came in Reservoir Dogs as Nice Guy Eddie and True Romance as Nicky Dimes (both characters in scripts written by Quentin Tarantino). In 1996, he won the best supporting actor at the Venice Film Festival for The Funeral. He appeared as the cocky fighter Travis Brickley in the films Best of the Best 1 & 2.

In Robert Altman's ensemble film Short Cuts, Penn played a troubled pool cleaner who is disturbed by his wife's profession; she is a telephone sex worker who takes calls from clients at home, to which Penn's character is obliged to listen. The dramatic ending of the film features the climactic response of Penn's character to this pent-up sexual frustration and feeling of powerlessness.

Penn also starred as the heavy-set, C4 dealing Clive in Rush Hour alongside Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker.

Penn also appeared as the heavy-set, couch potato drug dealing high school janitor in Murder by Numbers along side Sandra Bullock.

Penn was meant to appear in American Pie 2 as Stifler's dad, but the scenes featuring him were eventually cut as there wasn't sufficient time to include him in the film's plot. However, they did appear on the deleted scene reel from the movie's DVD.