Martin Sheen

Actor

Name at birth: Ramon Estevez

Social activist and the star of television's The West Wing (1999-2006), Martin Sheen has been a prolific performer on TV and in feature films since the late 1960s. He started on stage in New York, earning a Tony nomination for his performance in The Subject Was Roses (1964), a role he repeated in the 1968 film version. A young intense leading man, he played a disaffected killer in 1973's Badlands (co-starring Sissy Spacek) and starred in the famously troubled production of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979). Some of his best known work has been on television: he starred in The Execution of Private Slovik (1974), he won an Emmy for TV's The Long Road Home (1981) and he portrayed both Robert F. Kennedy (in 1974's The Missiles of October) and John F. Kennedy (in 1983's Kennedy). Sheen is the father of actors Charlie Sheen, Emilio Estevez, Renee Estevez and Ramon Estevez.

Extra credit: Sheen's father was from Spain and his mother was from Ireland... He has been arrested more than 60 times for protesting such things as nuclear weapons and the treatment of the homeless in the United States.