Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota on November 29, 1954, Joel Coen studied at New York University before moving into filmmaking in the early 1980s. He and his younger brother began writing screenplays while Joel acted as an assistant editor for good friend Sam Raimi's Evil Dead (1982). In 1984, the brothers made their screen debut with Blood Simple. Both of them wrote and edited the film (using the name Roderick Jaynes for the latter duty), for which Joel took directing credit and Ethan took producing credit. It earned considerable critical acclaim and established the brothers as fresh,
… More original talent. Their next major effort (after Crimewave, a 1985 film they wrote that was directed by Raimi), the 1987 Raising Arizona, was a screwball comedy miles removed from the dark, violent content of their previous film, and it won over critics and audiences alike.
Their fan base growing, the brothers went on to make Miller's Crossing (1990), a stark gangster epic with a strong performance from John Turturro, whom the Coens would also use to great effect in their next film, Barton Fink (1991). Fink earned Joel a Best Director award and a Golden Palm at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival, as well as the Festival's Best Actor award for Turturro. A surreal, nightmarish film revolving around a writer's creative block, it was a heavily stylized, atmospheric triumph that further established the Coens as visionary arbiters of the bizarre.
Their follow-up to Barton Fink, The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), was a relative critical and commercial disappointment, though it did boast the sort of heavily stylized, postmodern irony that had so endeared the brothers to their audience. Whatever failings The Hudsucker Proxy exhibited, however, they were more than atoned for by the unquestionable success of the Coens' next film, Fargo (1996). A black, violent crime comedy with a surprisingly warm heart, it recalled Blood Simple in its themes of greed, corruption, and murder, but it provided more redemptive sentiment than was afforded to the characters of the previous film. The brothers shared a Best Original Screenplay Oscar for their work, and another Oscar, for Best Actress, went to Frances McDormand, to whom Joel had been married since 1984.
Following Fargo, the Coens went on to make The Big Lebowski in 1998. A blend of bungled crime and warped comedy, Lebowski was a laid-back, irreverent revision of the hardboiled L.A. detective genre. It met with mixed critical reception, though it did net a Golden Bear nomination for Joel Coen at the Berlin Film Festival. The year 2000 brought the Coens into the depression-era with O Brother Where art Thou? An admittedly loose adaptation of Homer's The Odyssey, O Brother starred George Clooney, John Turturro, and Tim Blake Nelson as escaped convicts on a surreal journey through 1930's Mississippi. Wasting no time in production of their next feature, the following year found Joel the recipient of his third best director award at the Cannes Film Festival for the darkly comic, monochromatic post-noir The Man Who Wasn't There. Starring Billy Bob Thornton as a humble, small town barber who gets mixed up in a tangled web of blackmail and deciept, the moody atmostphere of The Man Who Wasn't There eschewed the wacky antics of O Brother in favor of a darker, more moody tone that recalled such earlier Coen efforts as Blood Simple and Barton Fink.
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