Bardem was born in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Gran Canaria, the son of Carlos Encinas and the actress Pilar Bardem. Bardem comes from a long line of filmmakers and actors who have been working since the earliest days of Spanish cinema; he is the grandson of actors Rafael Bardem and Matilde Muñoz Sampedro, and the nephew of screenwriter and director Juan Antonio Bardem. Both his older brother and older sister, Carlos and Mónica Bardem, are also actors. His film debut was at the age of six in the film El Pícaro (The Scoundrel) and he appeared in several television series before turning to painting and, eventually, athletics. Before acting professionally, Bardem was a member of the Spanish national rugby team.

Bardem starred in his first major motion picture, The Ages of Lulu, when he was 20. In 1992, he made his first international hit with Jamón, Jamón, which also starred Penélope Cruz. After starring in roughly two dozen films in his native country, he would eventually land his international breakthrough performance role in Julian Schnabel's Before Night Falls in 2000, as Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for the role, the first time for a Spaniard. This also marked Bardem's first English-language speaking role. In 2002 he starred in John Malkovich's directorial debut, The Dancer Upstairs.

Bardem won the Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival for his role in 2004's The Sea Inside, in which he portrayed assisted-suicide activist Ramón Sampedro. That year he also made a brief appearance as a vicious crime lord who summons Tom Cruise's hitman to do the dirty work of dispatching witnesses, in Michael Mann's crime drama Collateral, which also starred Jamie Foxx. In the Coen Brothers' 2007 film No Country for Old Men, based upon the novel of the same name, he plays chilling sociopathic hitman Anton Chigurh. For that role, he won a Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild award for Best Supporting Actor and also won the Critic's Choice Award for Best Supporting Actor. He is currently in the running for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He also appears in the 2007 film adaptation of the classic Latin American novel Love in the Time of Cholera.

--Wikipedia