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Ben Affleck is an American actor and filmmaker. His first screen appearance was at the age of eight in a minor part in the independent film The Dark End of the Street (1981). He went on to appear in several television shows, including the PBS educational programs The Voyage of the Mimi (1984) and The Second Voyage of the Mimi (1988), and an episode of the ABC Afterschool Special in 1986. Affleck played an antisemite in the sports film School Ties (1992) and featured as a regular on the television drama Against the Grain (1993). He gained attention for playing the supporting part of a high-school senior in Richard Linklater's cult film Dazed and Confused (1993), after which he had his first leading role in Rich Wilkes's comedy Glory Daze (1995).
In 1997, he played a comics artist in Smith's art-house success Chasing Amy, and featured in and co-wrote the screenplay of the drama Good Will Hunting with Matt Damon; they won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for it. He next starred with Bruce Willis in Michael Bay's $554 million-grossing science fiction film Armageddon (1998), which proved to be his biggest commercial success to that point. In 2000, Affleck formed a production company with Damon and Sean Bailey, named LivePlanet, which produced Project Greenlight (2001–05, 2015), a television series that provides training to first-time filmmakers. He has served as the executive producer of several projects directed by the winners of the show. Affleck played opposite Kate Beckinsale in Bay's war film Pearl Harbor (2001), which despite negative reviews was a box office hit. His career subsequently went through a period of decline when he starred in a series of critical and commercial failures, including the superhero film Daredevil (2003), and the comedies Gigli (2003) and Surviving Christmas (2004). He later made a comeback with the biographical film Hollywoodland (2006), in which his portrayal of the actor George Reeves earned him a Golden Globe nomination.
In 2007, Affleck made his feature film directorial debut with Gone Baby Gone, a thriller based on the novel by Dennis Lehane, which was critically praised. He went on to act in and direct two acclaimed features for Warner Bros.—the crime drama The Town (2010) and the thriller Argo (2012). The latter, about the 1979 Iran hostage crisis in which he played the intelligence agent Tony Mendez, won the Academy Award for Best Picture and Affleck won the Golden Globe and BAFTA for Best Director. In 2014, Affleck played a man accused of murdering his wife in David Fincher's thriller Gone Girl. Two years later, he starred as Batman in the superhero film Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) which grossed a worldwide total of over $873 million at the box office—his highest-grossing release, a role he will reprise in subsequent installments set in the DC Extended Universe.