Think Lars von Trier directing Charlotte Gainsbourg to crush his testicles with a block of wood in Antichrist Madonna, playing a dominatrix, pouring hot wax over his naked body in Body of Evidence ('Not there,' said his eloquent grimace. Perhaps that early experience of neglect explains why Dafoe has so often been an obliging actor, ready to do anything to accommodate a director's fruity demands. Maybe – and it's a theory that would get me evicted from Freudian analysis 101 – the abandoned boy became the inveterate pleaser of adults.
My dad was a surgeon, my mom a nurse, and they were always out working.
When Willem Dafoe was a little boy in Appleton, Wisconsin, he shut himself in a closet for two days.
