Imagine growing up with Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen on the beaches of Santa Monica, California.
Everybody will eventually grow up to be famous.
Oh, yeah, and your mom and dad are big stars too in the black-and-white era of television.
That’s sorta how Sean Penn’s life began 60 years ago today.
His mother Eileen Ryan, who died in 1998, had a prolific TV career and also starred in films later in her career, some of them with her oldest son, Sean.
Today the veteran actor is known more for his activism.
Penn was in Atlanta just days ago as part of the Community Organized Relief Effort, which he co-founded, inking a $3 million deal with Fulton County that will fund mobile testing in communities declared coronavirus hotspots through the end of the year.
The group is reportedly already operating in 10 cities across the country and has tested 100,000 people in Fulton for the virus since March.
“We’re in a chaotic space, we’re void of a national leadership,” said Penn, adding that they’ve been successful in Fulton and Atlanta “despite even adversarial counter-positions across the state.”
Young Sean’s career began at 14 when he made a brief appearance on the 112th episode of “Little House on the Prairie” in 1974, which was directed by his father, Leo Penn.
Twenty-nine years later the actor would receive his first Oscar.
From the beginning, Sean Penn seemed destined for the big screen, and his acting range showed incredibly early.
His first role on the silver screen was as a military cadet in the 1981 film “Taps,” in which he starred alongside a young Tom Cruise. The following year he played the hilarious pot-smoking teen surfer in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.” And a year after that, he played a tough but troubled young hoodlum who survives a brutal juvenile lockup in the movie “Bad Boys.”
The film catapulted him to stardom and gained Penn a reputation as a serious actor.
Several films would follow throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, gaining Penn even more critical acclaim, including “At Close Range,” and “Dead Man Walking,” for which he was nominated for an Oscar. Penn also received an Oscar nomination for 1999′s “Sweet and Lowdown” and 2001′s “I Am Sam.”
He won his first Academy Award for best actor in the 2003 film “Mystic River” and his second for his role in the 2008 biopic “Milk,” in which he portrayed gay-rights icon and politician Harvey Milk.
After a long string of celebrity relationships from Madonna to Charlize Therone, Penn wed 28-year-old Australian actress Leila George on July 30. The couple made their first public appearance since their wedding Saturday in Los Angeles, according to reports.
Aside from his acting career, Penn has been an activist for decades, encountered many controversies along the way.
He criticized the George W. Bush administration in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.
He also helped perform some of the rescues in New Orleans during the Hurricane Katrina disaster in 2005.
In 2008 he had a sit-down with Cuban President Raul Castro and was friends with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. When he died in 2013, Penn said “I lost a friend I was blessed to have.”
In the aftermath of 2010′s devastating earthquake in Haiti, Penn’s aid group worked alongside U.S. soldiers constructing settlement camps for thousands of displaced residents who had no other refuge.
The experience, in particular, put him at public odds with President Donald Trump in January 2018 after Trump allegedly made racist statements about Haiti and African nations during an Oval Office meeting with lawmakers on immigration reform.
Penn wrote an op-ed for Time Magazine titled “Donald Trump Is the Enemy of Compassion.”
“The solution to our current divisiveness does not live in the White House. Instead, we will find unity only when we recognize that in our current president we have elected, perhaps for the first time in our history, an enemy of compassion,” Penn wrote. “Indeed, we can be unified not only with each other but with Africa, El Salvador, Haiti, Mexico, the Middle East and beyond if we recognize President Donald Trump is an enemy of Americans, Republicans, Democrats, Independents and every new child born. An enemy of mankind. He is indeed an enemy of the state.”
In January 2016, Rolling Stone Magazine revealed that Penn had conducted a secret interview with Mexican drug kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán before one of America’s most wanted criminals was taken into custody in a bloody raid. His involvement left the White House and other U.S. officials grumbling.
Sean Justin Penn was born on August 17, 1960, in Santa Monica, California.
His brother, the actor Chris Penn, remembered most from the film “Reservoir Dogs,” died in 2006.
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