Dafoe soon joined the new company and is credited as one of its co-founders. Following tensions between Schechner and other members after they started staging their own productions outside of the group, Schechner left and the remaining members (including LeCompte and her ex-boyfriend Spalding Gray) renamed themselves The Wooster Group. He then apprenticed under Richard Schechner, the director of the avant-garde theater troupe The Performance Group, where he met and became romantically involved with director Elizabeth LeCompte. He later took the new interpretation as part of his stage name because he had become more used to it than his birth name.Īfter attending Appleton East High School, Dafoe studied drama at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, but left after 18 months to join the experimental theater company Theatre X in Milwaukee, before moving to New York City in 1976. In high school, he acquired the nickname Willem, the Dutch version of the name William.

During an interview, he said that half of his family puts the emphasis on the first syllable of the surname while the other half emphasizes the second syllable. His surname, Dafoe, is the English version of the Swiss surname Thévou. He recalled in 2009, 'My five sisters raised me because my father was a surgeon, my mother was a nurse and they worked together, so I didn't see either of them much.' His brother, Donald, is a surgeon and research scientist.

He has five sisters and two brothers and is of English, French, German, Irish, and Scottish descent. William James Dafoe was born on July 22, 1955, in Appleton, Wisconsin, the son of Muriel Isabel (née Sprissler 1922–2012) and Dr.

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