In building a picture of Tommy Lee Jones, it's interesting to compare him to others born in the same year. Like Dolly Parton, he's a down-home country-type, but with a similar wild streak to David Lynch's. Onscreen, he possesses the same outlandish charisma as Alan Rickman. Off-screen, his passion and artistic tunnel-vision have caused him problems with his peers, much like Syd Barrett. But then that year also saw the arrival of Ted Bundy and Ian Lavender, so go figure. 

Perhaps it's more revealing to compare him with Oliver Stone. Both are challenging and controversial in their work, both have risen from rough, macho beginnings to the heights of Hollywood (a system in which they excel yet somehow do not fit), and both have peculiar and uncompromising views of how things should be done. And strangely, considering they have so many similarities and have worked together so many times, Stone and Jones were born on exactly the same day - the 15th of September, 1946.

Tommy's birthplace was San Saba, Texas, about 80 miles north-west of Austin. He's an 8th generation Texan, though he's one quarter Cherokee, with Welsh ancestry. His father, Clyde C. Jones (he had no middle name, just the C), was an oil-field worker, who'd laboured in Libya, but mostly in Texas. Tommy's mother, Lucille Marie (nee Scott, known as Marie), was a police officer and a hairdresser, later owning a beauty parlour. She bore another child, a son, when Tommy was 3, but the child sadly died in infancy.

Tommy's early life was tough. The family originally raised cattle, but were crushed by an extended drought in the early Fifties and forced to rethink their lives. Clyde was a drinker and Tommy's described his relationship with him as "combative and emotionally abusive. He wasn't there for me that much". Clyde and Marie would divorce when Tommy was still young, then remarry and divorce again.

Credit: tiscali.co.uk