Bill was born and raised in Fort Worth, Texas, the second of four children in an upper middle-class family headed by a lumber wholesaler, John Lane Paxton (II). He was raised a catholic and was an altar boy. John Paxton played in:
In 1973, while on a high school foreign exchange program in England, Bill met two other Texans that had an interest in movies. Later, on their return to the United States they pooled about $600.00 to buy a Super 8 sound movie camera set, they had decided to make their own movies. Together they shot a 35 minute short titled "The Parabel", which was strongly influenced by Dirty Harry. Not content to settle for small-time special effects, the young filmmakers borrowed guns to shoot holes in cars for one realistic action sequence. Bill even went so far that he set his arm on fire for one movie they made.
His parents supported his decision, at the age of eighteen, to move to Los Angeles, California after he had been promised a few weeks of work on an educational film.
The few weeks turned into three years, when he wasn't hanging around movie sets, he paid the bills by parking cars at the Beverly Hills Hotel. He earned his first break in 1975 at Roger Corman's New World Pictures, where he worked as a set dresser and eventually won a small role in Crazy Mama (1975) which was directed by Jonathan Demme.
Convinced that he would get more work with the benefit of a few acting lessons, he relocated to the East Coast to study acting under famed drama coach Stella Adler, at New York University. Miss Adler was considered by many American theatre professionals to be the finest teacher of acting in the country.
When he returned to the West Coast, Bill's career began to take shape. After landing a small role in Stripes (1981) as a soldier, Bill found steady work in low-budget films and TV, with eleven appearances on the silver screen between 1981 and 1986.
You'd think he would have had plenty to do making movies, but during this same period, Bill wrote, directed, and produced the theatrical short, "Fish Heads" (1982), which I have been told, aired on "Saturday Night Live" (1985) which won a Special Award at the 1982 Melbourne Film Festival. He also co-authored and produced the short "Scoop" (1983) which won an Honorable Mention at the 1983 USA Film Festival. California musician Andrew Todd and our Texas-born Bill Paxton comprise a band called Martini Ranch a wickedly inventive, visually oriented pop-culture nuthouse of a rock band based in Los Angeles. In 1988 they released an album named "Holy Cow" on the Sire label, which is out of print now.
Around the same time, Bill starred in the music video for the New Order song, "Touched by the Hand of God", which was directed by Kathryn Bigelow. He also appeared in the music video for Pat Benatar's "Shadows Of The Night" (radio operator). With all of that going on, he still found time to charm and marry Louise Newbury, whom he met in London in 1982, when she was 17 years old.
His first appearance in a James Cameron film (Bill had also done a musical video for the Martini Ranch song "Reach" with Cameron) was a small role in Terminator (1984). Bill also appeared in John Hughes' Weird Science (1985), as Wyatt's sadistic older brother Chet. Followed by his very memorable performance as Private Hudson in Aliens (1986) where Bill won the Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actor, Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films for his performance in this movie and as the nomadic vampire Severen in Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark (1987).
Although he continued to take supporting roles in mainstream action flicks, Bill defied typecasting by simultaneously appearing in offbeat, independent productions. He played a boozy vampire with a weakness for fast cars in Near Dark (1987); he locked lips with a corpse for The Dark Backward (1991); and he wowed the critics with a rare starring role as One False Move's (1991) flamboyant hick sheriff, Dale "Hurricane" Dixon.
Portraying weirdo's may well have solidified his reputation as a gifted actor, but it was Bill's ability to play straight shooters that finally blew his career potential wide open. Offers began pouring in after his earnest turn as astronaut and family man Fred Haise in Apollo 13.
Even at the time when "Twister" was playing on the big screen, Bill was frequently mistaken for that other Bill, ID4's alien-battling president, Bill Pullman. Surely men are making this mistake, never a female. Check it out for yourself, if you don't believe me.
But he has come a long way towards rectifying this case of mistaken identity with a string of romantic lead assignments. He mixed it up with Shirley MacLaine in the big-screen adaptation of Larry McMurtry's "The Evening Star" (1996), he fell hard for Julianna Margulies in "Traveller" (1996), a film that marked his feature-film-producing debut. He is sure to move away onto a new level of his own.
Bill appeared in a pivotal role in James Cameron's 1997 blockbuster "Titanic", and closed out 1998 with sharp turn as an Everyman undone by greed in the Sam Raimi-directed thriller "A Simple Plan" (1998). Also a more lighthearted outing as a conservancy field agent who discovers love and a really big monkey in Africa in Disney's "Mighty Joe Young" (1998).
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