The world knows Ethan Hawke as the Academy Award-nominated movie star, director, and author of two novels. But Hawke is also the kid from Princeton Junction who worked at Burger King and Thomas Sweet ice cream on Nassau Street and broke into acting at the age of 12 when he earned $30 in a minor role in McCarter Theater’s 1983 production of “St. Joan.” ##M:[more]##
Hawke, who started high school at West Windsor-Plainsboro but later transferred to the Hun School, Class of 1988, later played Romeo in McCarter’s “Summer Shakespeare” student production of “Romeo and Juliet,” as well as a role in “Pericles.”
People who knew him then, or who just know him now, can see him on screen this Saturday, July 8, at 9 p.m. in the outdoor cinema series sponsored by his former employer, Thomas Sweet. “Before Sunset,” the 2004 R-rated film in which Hawke stars with Julie Delpy, will be shown at Petteronello Gardens Amphitheater off Mountain Avenue in Princeton.
As reporter Phyllis Spiegel reports in the July 5 edition of U.S. 1, Hawke was born in Austin, Texas, where his parents had met in college. They divorced when Hawke was three. With his mother, Leslie Hawke, and her second husband, Patrick Powers, an internal management consultant at CBS (the couple divorced in the early 1990s), Ethan moved to Princeton Junction in 1981 when he was in fifth grade. “It was more affordable than Brooklyn Heights where we were living then, had good public schools, and our house was walking distance from the train to New York, where I was an editor for a publishing company,” Leslie Hawke writes via E-mail from Romania, where she now lives.
She continued to live in the Princeton area until 1996 (Ethan’s career was booming by then), when she moved to Manhattan. She left corporate life in 2000 to join the Peace Corps and stayed on in Romania after her service ended in 2003 to co-found a charity for impoverished children of Roma (gypsy) descent.
Ethan’s biological father, James Hawke, is an actuary in Indiana. Ethan’s two younger half-brothers — Matthew, who just graduated from college, and Samuel, who is a student — have become a part of Ethan’s life in recent years, according to Leslie Hawke.
“Ethan was a very easy-going, agreeable and observant little kid,” she says. “The main thing we did together was go to movies, and usually movies that I wanted to see, movies that, as I look back, were probably not all that appropriate for a child. But he always wanted to go and he never seemed bored — or traumatized. “The first time I took him to a movie was when he was five days old. I nursed him through ‘Five Easy Pieces’ the week it was released in Austin, Texas. He handled it so well. I continued taking him from then on. I liked foreign films, and Woody Allen, Robert Altman, pretty much anything that had more words than action, so that’s what he grew up on.
She says that during Ethan’s childhood in Princeton Junction most of the family’s social life centered around Trinity Episcopal Church. She and her husband, Patrick, ran the youth group when Ethan was in high school, and he was a member and was confirmed at Trinity. “I think the Rev. Jean Smith, who was there at the time, had a strong influence on his spiritual side,” she says.
“Ethan was always socially adept and made friends easily.” Dating? “He never talked to me about that but he got a lot of phone calls.” Athletic? “He played Pop Warner football in junior high and soccer on and off but I don’t recall that he did a sport in high school because they usually interfered with rehearsals for school plays.”
Did Leslie ever think she was raising a movie star? “When he was in third grade, I took him to see ‘Annie’ on tour in Atlanta, and at intermission he said to me matter-of-factly, ‘I could do that.’ When he was about 12, on his first day of acting class at McCarter, the director, Nagle Jackson, chose him to play the page in ‘St. Joan,’ and I thought, ‘Hmm, maybe he can.’
“Ethan liked anything that had an element of performance in it. He excelled at drama and English but was a pretty average student in everything else. Once, when he got an ‘A’ in Chemistry, I said, ‘See you can do it! Now how does that make you feel?’ And he replied, ‘Like I studied too hard.’”
Before Sunset, Thomas Sweet Outdoor Cinema, Pettoranello Gardens Amphitheater, Princeton. Free. 609-924-7222 or www.thomassweet.com. Saturday, July 8, 9 p.m.
