Favorite Blast of The Past for January 17th:

Matt Dillon
From: Favorite Hunks & Other Things

 Oh Matt Dillon in his tighty whities in Little Darlings was a site to behold. Not sure Kristy McNichol really cared, but I did. Matt Dillon never was shy to take off his shirt as a teen idol and is one of few actors from the early 80's making great movies today. Here's to Matt!

 Matthew Raymond "Matt" Dillon (born February 18, 1964) is an American actor and film director. He began acting in the late 1970s, and gained fame as a teenage idol during the 1980s. He has appeared in films such as Little Darlings (1980), My Bodyguard (1980), Tex (1982), Rumble Fish (1983), The Outsiders (1983), Drugstore Cowboy (1989), Singles (1992), Beautiful Girls (1996), There's Something About Mary (1998), Wild Things (1998), Herbie: Fully Loaded (2005), Crash (2005),You, Me and Dupree (2006), and Armored (2009). In 2013, he appeared in the comedy film The Art of the Steal as an art thief alongside Kurt Russell.

 In 1990, he won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Male Lead for Drugstore Cowboy and in 2006 won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Male for Crash and the San Sebastián International Film Festival Donostia Lifetime Archievement Award. "Crash" won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2005. In 2011 he received the special "Tomislav Pinter Award" at Avvantura Festival Zadar (Croatia) upon his presence at the film festival.

 Matthew Raymond Dillon was born in New Rochelle, New York, the son of Mary Ellen, a homemaker, and Paul Dillon, a portrait painter and sales manager for Union Camp, a packing material manufacturer. His paternal grandmother was the sister of comic strip artist Alex Raymond, the creator of Flash Gordon. Dillon is the second of six children; he has one sister and four brothers, one of whom, Kevin Dillon,  is also an actor and appeared on the hit TV series Entourage, which earned him several Emmy nominations in the supporting actor comedy category. He has Irish, and some Scottish and German, ancestry. Dillon was raised in a close-knit Roman Catholic family. He grew up in Mamaroneck, New York.

 In 1978, Jane Bernstein and a friend were helping director Jonathan Kaplan cast the violent teen drama Over the Edge when they found Dillon cutting class at Hommocks Middle School in Larchmont. Dillon auditioned for a role and made his debut in the film. The film received a regional, limited theatrical release in May 1979, and grossed only slightly over $200,000. Dillon's performance was well-received, which led to his casting in two films released the following year; the teenage sex comedy Little Darlings, in which Kristy McNichol's character loses her virginity to a boy from the camp across the lake, played by Dillon, and the more serious teen dramedy My Bodyguard, where he played a high-school bully opposite Chris Makepeace. The films, released in March and July 1980, respectively, were box office successes and raised Dillon's profile among teenage audiences.

 Another of Dillon's early roles was in the Jean Shepherd PBS special The Great American Fourth of July and Other Disasters. The only available copies of this film are stored at UCLA, where a legal dispute makes it unavailable to the public.

 One of his next roles was in Liar's Moon, where he played Jack Duncan, a poor Texas boy madly in love with a rich banker's daughter. In the early 1980s, Dillon also had prominent roles in three adaptations of S. E. Hinton novels: Tex (1982), The Outsiders (1983) and Rumble Fish (1983). All three films were shot in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Hinton's hometown. The Outsiders and Rumble Fish had Dillon working with Francis Ford Coppola and Diane Lane. He followed those up with The Flamingo Kid in 1984. He made his Broadway debut with the play The Boys of Winter in 1985.

 Dillon did voice over work in the 1987 documentary film Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam. In 1989, Dillon won critical acclaim for his performance as a drug addict in Gus Van Sant's Drugstore Cowboy.

Also in 1987 Dillon appeared as a policeman in the video to The Pogues and Kirsty MacColl video Fairytale of New York.

Dillon continued to work in the early 1990s with roles in movies like Singles (1992). He had somewhat of a career resurgence when he played Nicole Kidman's husband in To Die For (1995), as well as starring roles in Wild Things (1998) and There's Something About Mary (1998), for which he received an MTV Movie Award for Best Villain.

In 2002, he wrote and directed the film City of Ghosts, starring himself, James Caan and Gérard Depardieu. In 2005, he starred in Factotum, a film adaptation of an autobiographical work by Charles Bukowski. Two years later he received critical praise and earned a Best Supporting Actor Golden Globe along with Oscar nominations for his role in Crash, a film co-written and directed by Paul Haggis. In 2005 Dillon co-starred in Disney's Herbie: Fully Loaded and on March 11, 2006 hosted Saturday Night Live, in which he impersonated Greg Anderson and Rod Serling in sketches.

 Dillon starred in the comedy You, Me and Dupree, opposite Kate Hudson and Owen Wilson. The film opened on July 14, 2006. On September 29, 2006, Dillon was honored with the Premio Donostia prize in the San Sebastián International Film Festival.

Dillon contributed his voice as the narrator, Sal Paradise, in an audiobook version of Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road. In 2006, he narrated Once in a Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos.

 Dillon appeared in several music videos during his career. He made a cameo appearance as a detective in Madonna's Bad Girl music video which also stars Christopher Walken. Dillon appeared in 1987 in the music video for "Fairytale of New York" by the Irish folk-punk band The Pogues playing a cop who escorts lead singer Shane MacGowan into the "drunk tank". In 2007, the band Dinosaur Jr. hired Dillon to direct the video for their single "Been There All The Time" from the album Beyond. That year, he starred in The Simpsons episode "Midnight Towboy".

Dillon had a three-year relationship with actress Cameron Diaz in the late 1990s.

On December 30, 2008, he was arrested by the Vermont State Police after he was clocked traveling at 106 miles per hour northbound on Interstate 91 near Newbury, Vermont. He was charged with negligent operation of a vehicle. His attorney, Mark Kaplan, entered a plea of not guilty on Dillon's behalf in a January appearance in Orange County Court in Chelsea, and also appeared in court on February 25, 2009. He faced a maximum of one year in jail, and a fine of $1,000. He plead guilty to speeding and paid a $828 fine on March 30, 2009; in return, the negligence charge was dismissed by prosecutors.