We could say that he’s American cinema’s last rebel. A rebel with a cause and reasons. He’s certainly an actor who respects his ideas in both his life and his work. In not very many years, Sean Penn has shown that he is the worthy heir of an actor stock dating back to James Cagney in the thirties, Bogart in the forties, or Pacino in the seventies. Born in California in 1960 into a showbusiness family, Sean Penn is the middle of three sons dedicated to art: his elder brother is a musician and his younger brother an actor. Passionately fond of surf, theatre actor in New York, it was his part as a cadet in the Harold Becker’s movie Taps, alongside Timothy Hutton and Tom Cruise, that catapulted him onto the front line of the young actors of the moment. Four years later he once again coincided with Hutton on John Schlesinger’s The Falcon and the Snowman. In 1988, when working with Dennis Hopper on Colors, his life started to change. In 1991 he met Robin Wright, with whom he had two children, debuting in directing with Indian Runner. He has continued his career with The Crossing Guard and The Pledge, both with Jack Nicholson, and with his personal vision of the September 11 attacks in the USA segment of the collective movie 11’09’’01-September 11. Meanwhile, his figure as an actor has done nothing but grow in parts as harsh as Dead Man Walking, which moreover allowed him to solidify his friendship with Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins, Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, Jesse Nelson’s I am Sam Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River, or Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 21 grams, for which he garnered the Copa Volpi for Best Actor at the Venice Festival.