Javier Ángel Encinas Bardem (born March 1, 1969) is an Academy Award, four-time Goya Award, BAFTA, Screen Actors Guild Award, and Golden Globe-winning Spanish actor. He has made over two dozen films in his native country, but became an international star with his starring role in the critically acclaimed Before Night Falls. With this role, he became the first Spanish actor ever to receive an Academy Award nomination. Bardem won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Award and British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Award for his performance as the antagonist Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men.

Javier Bardem is the youngest member of a family of actors that has been making films since the early days of Spanish cinema.He got his start in the family business at age six when he appeared in his first feature, "El Pícaro" (The Scoundrel). During his teenage years he acted in several TV series, played rugby for theSpanish National Team, and toured the country with an independent theatrical group. Javier's early film role as a sexy stud in the black comedy_Jamón, jamón (1992)_ (Ham Ham) propelled him to instant popularity and threatened to typecast him as nothing morethan a brawny sex symbol. Determined to avert a beefcake image, he refused similar subsequent roles and has gone on to win acclaim for his ability to appear almost unrecognizable from film to film. With over 25 movies and numerous awards under his belt, it is Javier's stirring, passionate performance as the persecuted Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas in Before Night Falls (2000) that will longbe remembered as his breakthrough role. He received five Best Actor awards and a Best Actor Oscar nomination for his portrayal of a strong-willed man who survived censorship, imprisonment, and homosexual intolerance for the privilege to write freely, only to commit suicide at age 47 in New York, ending a battle with AIDS.