Originally planning to be a forest ranger, the Hollywood star/Oscar nominee/Steppenwolf Theater founder/bit actor in a Eurythmics video became a thespian thanks to an infatuation with an Eastern theater major.

“At college there was this girl that I liked a lot,” Malkovich said in LEI magazine. “She did ceramics, she had masses of hair on her head and resembled Carly Simon. The unreachable type. I was looking for a way to get to her when she asked me to accompany her to a diction lesson, and then to an audition for a part in a play. We did the audition, they took me, not her: that was the end of our relationshiop. I soon met another girl - a real actress this time - and I started to take more interest in her work."

While no one knows much about the relationship that sent him to theater, it may have went very sour. Rumors are Malkovich hates Eastern with a passion. He rarely, if ever, talks about the school and never comes back or grants interview with local publications.

That doesn’t stop him from being one of the coolest people to ever step on Eastern’s campus. He’s done dozens of plays, movies and even some modeling. While note his best work, the work that may solidify his global cult following is Being John Malkovich.

John Gavin Malkovich was born Dec. 9, 1953 in Benton, Illinois, one of five children of a journalist mother and an environmentalist father. A fat kid for most of his childhood (230 pounds!) who played football and baseball, Malkovich in high school put himself on a jello-only diet for about three months until he lost 70 pounds.

Malkovich majored in environmental studies to become a forest ranger (he spent some time fighting forest fires in Glacier National Park). But then he met the Carly Simon look-alike and wandered aimlessly into acting. She was the “coolest girl on campus,” close friend Russ Smith told Interview Magazine.

"Oh, there was most definitely an actor there,” Smith told the magazine. “He was very self-conscious; he wore ‘40s style gangster clothes and platform shoes. His hair went down to his shoulders and was spiked on top like Rod Stewart's.... It was clear even then that John was not a guy who was going to be sitting in a treetop with binoculars, looking for forest fires, for a living."

While his stay at Eastern was short-lived, he met up with a fellow actress who would later join him at Steppenwolf: EIU Hall of Fame inductee Joan Allen. Allen’s description of Malkovich, told in Premier magazine, is similar to Smith’s.

"John was one of the first people I mat, and he had these purple platform shoes on,” Allen is quoted as saying. “He shared one of those houses with a couch and a rocking chair on the front porch. One of the women there was a bisexual, and maybe one of the guys -- it was very eye opening."

Allen told Eastern Illinois University’s alumni magazine that Malkovich was “beyond cool.”

“I was really drawn to him and probably terrified at the same time,” she told the Old Main Line. I didn’t know what to make of him because I was just this naive little gal from a small town in northern Illinois. I remember standing in the lobby of the theater building after my first semester talking to someone and John came over to me, stuck his finger through the belt loop in my jeans, and pulled me aside. I’m wondering, ‘What is this guy doing? And why is he doing it to me?’ ”

“He pulled me to the side and then he asked me to do an acting scene with him,” Allen said. “It was from this Arthur Miller play called After the Fall. That was a really very cool experience and I think we actually did it for an English class that was studying the play. It was thrilling to work on the scene with him because he was the dark, mysterious, interesting guy in the Theatre Department. He didn’t usually get cast on the main stage because he did a lot of self-generated work, Harold Pinter and things like that. He was really the first one to introduce me to writers like Pinter and Edward Albee, as well as Ionesco and absurdist playwriting. After I met John I would go to the library and just pull plays down off the shelf that I had never imagined existed. It opened a whole new world to me and that was pretty exciting, too.”

Despite all this cool stuff going on in Charleston, Malkovich transferred from Eastern and went to Illinois State University.

Illinois State sucks. Malkovich seemed to think so. In fact, he didn’t think much about college as it related to his future career.

“Everything I know about acting I've learned on my own,” he told Buzz magazine. “I took some classes in college, but they were pretty inconsequential for the most part. It was the work I did with my friends at Steppenwolf that proved to be the best education that I could have.”

Malkovich got picked up for Steppenwolf when Illinois Stater Gary Sinese, Steppenwolf’s founder, saw Malkovich performing The Man Who Came to Dinner at the school.

"It was the stupidest performance I'd ever seen," Sinise said, according to Interview. "I thought, We've got to get this freak into our theater."

Malkovich described the exchange with Interview this way: “They had seen some things I did in college, none of which were terribly successful, but they asked me to join in 1979, and I sort of felt, these assholes with their theater--sure. I didn't really know them, and what I did know of them, I didn't like. They were like the Angry Young Men, always complaining about one thing or another. And I really thought, maybe I'll do this for a while, a couple of weeks, or maybe a couple of months. I felt that could be all I could stand. That was thirteen years ago. And, you know, they're still my closest friends. We sort of started rehearsing the day we left college.”

Malkovich gutted it out with the rest of the early Steppenwolf founders. He drove a bus. There are unfounded rumors he acted on Barney Miller. By the early ‘80s, Malkovich was making about $100 a week. Among the highlights was a performance with Allen in the play Burn This.

Then came the breakthrough. In 1984, he appeared in The Killing Fields, True West (for which he won an Obie Award) and Places in the Heart, the latter of which earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

After that came role after role. Some of the more noteable films are Dangerous Liaisons, Of Mice and Men, Man in the Iron Mask, Con-Air (right) and In the Line of Fire, which earned him a second Best Supporting Actor Academy Award nomination.

The movie that may stick the longest, however, is Malkovich playing a parodied version of himself in Being John Malkovich, the story of a puppeteer played by John Cusack who finds a portal into Malkovich’s head at his job (which is located on the seventh-and-a-half floor). People can get inside Malkovich’s head for 15 minutes before being dumped onto the side of the New Jersey Turnpike. Craig starts a small business with a manipulative partner and everyone starts to get a piece of Malko. Malkovich is great in performing a character that is none-to-flattering.

"One of the reasons I particularly enjoyed the script was that it purposefully didn't choose easy targets," Malkovich told The New York Post. "I guess it could have been called 'Being Tom Cruise,' but an actor like Cruise has his career so tightly managed and spun that I don't think he'd ever find himself in such a project. Also, I don't think Charlie Kaufman wanted to go in that more obvious direction when he was writing the screenplay. And it would have been a completely different kind of movie if it had been, say, 'Being Charlie Sheen.' It would have been about parties with 40 hookers, which I'm not saying wouldn't be interesting, either."

Along with theater and films, Malkovich has modeled, designed clothes, appeared in the Eurythmics video “Walking on Broken Glass” and even did a public service announcement tell people they shouldn’t be embarassed to buy condoms. He plays the trumbone, saxaphone and guitar and likes, among others, Snoop Doggy Dogg.

He told Dr.Drew.com said if he didn’t get into acting he’d be teaching, “probably, maybe theater history.”

“Or I’d be teaching acting and directing,” he said. “I’d be in the theater in a more educational way. And I think I would have been fine. It would be no great loss to the world or to me. And I wouldn’t have been unhappy about that. My mother always said that, when I was a kid, if I wasn’t chosen for a game, I’d say it’s their problem, not mine. For better or worse, that’s how I was raised. And I’ll always be that way.”

Now, Malkovich is constantly traveling throughout Europe, the Middle East and United States working on multiple films--either acting in them or producing them. He lives in France with his longtime girlfriend Nicoletta Peyran and their children, daughter Amandine and son Lowey. He was married once, to Glenne Headly, and says he’ll never do it again. He said he likes France because they aren’t as obsessed with public figures as the United States is.

Even to this day, he doesn’t seem to have any love for Eastern Illinois University. I’ve never seen him mention the name of the school and many articles completely pass over Eastern and just talk about Illinois State. Malkovich didn't even show up when Eastern named him the parade marshall during a 1990s Homecoming. Thankfully, The Verge, the weekend entertainment section for The Daily Eastern News, featured a John Malkovich cut-out mask for people to wear in place of the bitter star.

Sources for information and some photos: An Unofficial John Malkovich Homepage, Premiere magazine, The New York PostThe Oscars, Hollywood Online, Back Lot, Dr.Drew.com, Buzz Mag and Mr. Showbiz