Sean Penn — actor with roots in the Russian Empire
Sean Justin Penn was born in Santa Monica, California, on 17 August 1960, the middle of three sons of the actor and director Leo Penn and the actress Eileen Ryan, née Annucci. His elder brother, Michael, became a musician; his younger brother, the actor Chris Penn, died in 2006. His connection to the Russian Empire runs through his father's parents.
Leo Penn was Jewish, the son of emigrants from Merkinė, a small town in southern Lithuania, which was then part of the Russian Empire. A claim that circulates online, that Leo was born 'Leo Pinchuk', is not supported by any source. Sean's mother was a Catholic of Irish and Italian descent.
He first appeared on screen as a teenager, as an extra in an episode of Little House on the Prairie directed by his father in 1974. His breakthrough came with Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), and over the next decades he became one of the most admired actors in American film, nominated for the Academy Award for Dead Man Walking (1995), Sweet and Lowdown (1999) and I Am Sam (2001). He won the Oscar for best actor for Clint Eastwood's Mystic River (2003), as a grieving father, and again for Gus Van Sant's Milk (2008), as the San Francisco politician Harvey Milk.
He has also directed films, among them The Indian Runner, The Crossing Guard (1995), The Pledge (2001) and Into the Wild (2007), which received two Academy Award nominations. After the Haiti earthquake of 2010 he co-founded, with Ann Lee, the relief organisation later known as CORE, which has since worked in other emergencies, including the COVID-19 pandemic.
On 15 March 2026 he won his third Academy Award, as best supporting actor, for his performance as Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw in Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another. It was his sixth nomination; the same performance had already won at the BAFTAs and at the Actor Awards, neither of which he attended either. He did not attend the ceremony; the award was accepted on his behalf by the previous year's winner, Kieran Culkin. He became the fourth man to win three acting Oscars, after Walter Brennan, Jack Nicholson and Daniel Day-Lewis.
Tracing the roots — Merkinė (now Lithuania), then in the Russian Empire — paternal grandparents
His father, the actor and director Leo Penn, was the son of Jewish emigrants from Merkinė, a small town in southern Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire. His mother, the actress Eileen Ryan, was a Catholic of Irish and Italian descent.
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Merkinė (now Lithuania), then in the Russian Empire — paternal grandparents. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.