Who

Joel and his younger brother Ethan Coen are the filmmaking duo responsible for movies like Fargo, The Big Lebowski, and No Country For Old Men. He's married to actress Frances McDormand.

Backstory

After a childhood in Minnesota spent shooting super-8 movies with his younger brother Ethan, Joel left high school early to attend Simon's Rock College, later moving to Manhattan to study film at NYU. He served as an assistant to future Spiderman director Sam Raimi—who was then known for campy horror films like Evil Dead—and in 1984 made his filmmaking debut along with Ethan with their dark comedy Blood Simple. (The film helped establish future Men in Black director Barry Sonnenfeld as a cinematographer, and introduced Joel to actress Frances McDormand, his future wife.) The duo's next film was 1987's offbeat but popular comedy Raising Arizona. They followed up with the 1990 crime flick Miller's Crossing, and, a year later, with the dark Hollywood comedy Barton Fink, which earned them the Palme d'Or at Cannes. The brothers' first picture aimed at mainstream audiences, 1994's The Hudsucker Proxy, was a critical and commercial disappointment, but they rebounded mightily with 1996's Fargo, which won Best Actress and Best Screenplay Oscars. They scored again with 1998's The Big Lebowski, which became a cult classic, and then had a modest hit in 2000's O Brother, Where Art Thou? although the soundtrack was more popular than the movie. The Coens directed a string of doozies in the early '00s—The Man Who Wasn't There, Intolerable Cruelty, Ladykillers—but returned to glory with their rapturously received 2007 adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's No Country For Old Men, which won the Oscar for Best Picture and yielded the brothers their first Oscar for Best Director. Then the George Clooney-Brad Pitt vehicle Burn After Reading, released in September '08, was both a hit with critics and at the box office.

Of note

Although Joel gets credited as director and Ethan as producer, it's widely known that the pair write, direct, and produce their movies in tandem. (They also edit their films together under the alias "Roderick Jaynes.") The Coens have a regular pool of actors of they work with, including McDormand, Steve Buscemi, John Turturro, and John Goodman. Stylistically, they're known for elaborately twisting plots, black humor, and macabre sight gags. (One of the most memorable scenes featured the body of Steve Buscemi being fed into a woodchipper in Fargo.) The next entry from the brothers will be a 1960s-set black comedy starring Adam Arkin, A Serious Man, and they're adapting the Michael Chabon novel The Yiddish Policeman's Union.

Personal

Coen lives on West End Avenue with wife Frances McDormand and their adopted son, Pedro. The family owns a separate penthouse above the apartment they live in, which they use for work, parties, and hosting guests.

Close call

In December 2006, the California inn where Coen and McDormand were staying for Christmas caught fire when a tree crashed through the building. They escaped safely, as did Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal.