Martin Sheen was born Ramon Estevez on August 3rd, 1940 in Dayton, Ohio to Irish immigrants. He was the seventh of ten children, one of the others being actor Joe Estevez. After deciding on acting as a career, he adopted the name of Martin Sheen and deliberately flunked his college entrance exams.

Sheen came to the attention of the critics at 24 with his performance as the lead in The Subject was Roses. This led to an episode of “The Outer Limits” and a regular role as Jack Davis in the soap opera “As The World Turns”. He made his film debut starring in The Incident (1967). He and Tony Musante played two teenage thugs who hijacked a subway train. Beau Bridges played the first passenger to stand up to them. This movie, which was directed by Larry Peerce, received massive critical acclaim, providing Sheen with a good start to his career.

Sheen’s next movie was the film version of The Subject Was Roses. He won the Best Supporting Actor Golden Globe for his portrayal of a soldier returning home to a dysfunctional family. Jack Albertson, who played the father, won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. Patricia Neal, who played the mother, was nominated for Best Supporting Actress.

These were the first of Sheen’s many successful movies. After leaving “As The World Turns”, he became extremely prolific, often appearing in four or five movies a year. Many continued in the vein of The Incident, with Sheen playing a violent youth. Chief among these was Badlands (1973). For this movie, him and Sissy Spacek teamed up to play two teenagers on a murderous rampage. Terrence Malick (The Thin Red Line, Days of Heaven) wrote and directed this critically acclaimed show.

In other movies, he played key political figures. He played Robert F Kennedy in The Missiles of October (1974), a made-for-TV movie based on Robert Kennedy’s book on the Cuban Missile Crisis. In 1979, he starred as John Dean in “Blind Ambition”, a mini-series about the life of Dean, special counsel to Richard Nixon. Rip Torn played Nixon, while Theresa Russel played Maureen Dean. For his part, Sheen won the Best TV Actor – Drama Golden Globe.

There was one major event that slowed down Sheen’s output for a year. It was the filming of Apocalypse Now (1979). Two weeks into the filming, Sheen was brought in to replace Harvey Keitel as Captain Benjamin L Willard. Willard was leading a secret mission in which he and a crew traveled down a river from Vietnam into Cambodia to assassinate a renegade colonel (Marlon Brando). The story was actually Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness adapted for the Vietnam War.

The filming of the movie was a major ordeal. At one point, a typhoon destroyed the set, delaying the shooting for several months. Since the movie was filmed in the Philippines, they borrowed the helicopters from the Marcos government. However, the helicopters often had to leave during the shoot to battle rebels, causing further delays. There was also extensive drug & alcohol use during the making of the film. Sheen had a heart attack. Director Francis Ford Coppola, who went into debt when the movie went over budget and often threatened suicide, lost 100 pounds during the shooting. When the movie had begun shooting, it was scheduled to take six weeks. It took sixteen months.

Although the movie was attacked by some critics when it came out, Apocalypse Now was soon considered a classic. Martin Sheen won the BAFTA Best Actor award in 1980. The movie was nominated for eight Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium. It won for Best Sound and Best Cinematography. Apocalypse Now is now considered one of the greatest movies ever made. Years later, a documentary chronicling the making of the movie, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, was released. Sheen also briefly parodied the movie in Hot Shots Part Deux (1993), which starred his son Charlie.

Since Apocalypse Now, Sheen has been extremely prolific. If all goes as planned, between the release of Apocalypse Now and the end of 1999, he will have appeared in over a hundred shows. Nearly seventy of those will have been during the 1990’s. Some of the standouts among these many movies are Gandhi (1982), the 1983 mini-series “Kennedy”, in which he played John F. Kennedy, Oliver Stone’s JFK, for which he was the narrator, and The American President (1995). A standout, although not for good reasons, was Spawn. This was a poor attempt to make a live-action movie from the comic book series.

Unlike most actors, who slow down as they get older, Sheen seems to make more and more movies every year. In 1999, he is slated to appear in nine movies. As well, unlike most stars, Sheen has stayed with his wife for several decades. Their four children, Charlie Sheen, Emilio Estevez, Renée Estevez, and Ramon Estevez, have all become actors, with Charlie and Emilio having the most commercial success. When Martin Sheen has not been acting in movies or raising his kids, he has been active in protest movements. Referring to himself as a ‘Christian Activist’, he has attended protests of nuclear arms, homelessness, and worker’s rights. At several of them, he was arrested. This, however, has not prevented Sheen from becoming one of the most prolific and talented actors in the second half of the twentieth century.