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Damon was raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and attended the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, where he took drama classes. At age 18 he landed a small part in Mystic Pizza (1988) and also enrolled in Harvard University as an English major. After appearing in the television movie Rising Son (1990), he left Harvard to pursue an acting career just 12 credits short of graduation. Roles in School Ties (1992) and Geronimo: An American Legend (1993) preceded his acclaimed performance as a young soldier forced to testify about a battle during the Persian Gulf War in Courage Under Fire (1996). This portrayal attracted the attention of director Francis Ford Coppola, who cast Damon as a novice lawyer opposite Danny DeVito in The Rainmaker (1997).

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As Damon’s acting career met with success, he also pursued screenwriting. With longtime friend Ben Affleck, he developed the script for Good Will Hunting (1997). The film—based on a one-act play Damon had submitted for a course at Harvard—centres on a troubled but brilliant high-school dropout from Boston. The coauthors persuaded Miramax to let them star in the movie alongside veteran actor Robin Williams. The film garnered nine Oscar nominations, including best actor for Damon. In 1998, at age 27, he won (with Affleck) the Academy Award for best original screenplay.

Highly sought after, Damon appeared in numerous movies in the late 1990s, including Rounders (1998), Steven Spielberg’s World War II blockbuster Saving Private Ryan (1998), and Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999). After several box-office disappointments, Damon starred in two film series that were hugely popular. He portrayed one of several con men who join forces in the Ocean’s trilogy—Ocean’s Eleven (2001), Ocean’s Twelve (2004), and Ocean’s Thirteen (2007). The films, directed by Steven Soderbergh, featured an all-star cast that included George Clooney and Brad Pitt. In the Jason Bourne series—The Bourne Identity (2002), The Bourne Supremacy (2004), The Bourne Ultimatum (2007), and Jason Bourne (2016)—Damon portrayed an amnesiac U.S.-trained assassin trying to unravel the secrets of his past. In addition to being commercial successes, the Bourne films also earned critical praise for their intelligence and kinetic pace.

Damon’s other roles in the early 21st century included an energy analyst who gets caught in the underside of the oil industry in Syriana (2005) and an agent forced to give up his family life in the early days of the CIA in Robert De Niro’s The Good Shepherd (2006). Also in 2006 Damon starred opposite Leonardo DiCaprio and Jack Nicholson in The Departed; the crime thriller, which was directed by Martin Scorsese, won an Academy Award for best picture. In 2009 Damon lent his voice to Ponyo, the English version of Miyazaki Hayao’s animated Gake no ue no Ponyo (2008; “Ponyo on the Cliff”). He later portrayed an unreliable whistle-blower in The Informant! (2009), a comedy directed by Soderbergh. In Clint Eastwood’s Invictus (2009), Damon starred as the captain of the South African rugby team urged by Nelson Mandela (played by Morgan Freeman) to win the 1995 World Cup in order to unite the racially divided country; for his performance, Damon earned an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor.

Damon continued to take on a wide range of roles in the 2010s. He appeared as a cocky Texas Ranger in the critically acclaimed western True Grit (2010), directed by the Coen brothers, and as a rogue army officer searching for weapons of mass destruction in the Iraq War drama Green Zone (2010). In 2011 he starred in the thriller The Adjustment Bureau, based on a story by Philip K. Dick; Contagion, Soderbergh’s thriller about a deadly virus; and We Bought a Zoo, adapted from a memoir about a family who moves to a wildlife park. Damon then wrote with costar John Krasinski the drama Promised Land (2012), in which Damon played a gas-company representative seeking to obtain drilling rights in a rural community.

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In 2013 Damon turned to television to portray the young lover of an aging Liberace (Michael Douglas) in Soderbergh’s biopic Behind the Candelabra. He then returned to movies with a string of science-fiction thrillers, playing an ex-convict fighting to leave ravaged Earth in the dystopian Elysium (2013), the head of a corporation attempting to prove that the universe will eventually collapse in upon itself in Terry Gilliam’s atmospheric The Zero Theorem (2013), and a desperate space explorer in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014).

During this time Damon also portrayed a member of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFAA) unit, which tracked down works of art stolen by the Nazis during World War II, in The Monuments Men (2014). He then was cast as an astronaut marooned on Mars in director Ridley Scott’s The Martian (2015), which earned Damon a third Oscar nomination for acting. After the disappointing fantasy thriller The Great Wall (2016), Damon starred in the dark comedy Suburbicon (2017) as a father with dubious motives. His other credits from 2017 included Downsizing, a sci-fi satire in which he portrayed a man who undergoes a medical procedure that causes him to shrink. Damon made cameos in such films as Deadpool 2 in 2018. The following year he starred with Christian Bale in Ford v Ferrari, a drama about the 24 Hours of Le Mans race in 1966.