Woody Harrelson shares a birthday with his father. July 23. He has said this himself — that finding out how much they had in common was “mind-blowing.” Same day of birth. Same easy charm with strangers. Same physical restlessness. The similarity was something Woody noticed and registered, not something he invented. It was real, and it was also one of the stranger complications in a biography already well-stocked with complications: because his father, Charles Voyde Harrelson, was a convicted contract killer serving two consecutive life sentences in the federal penitentiary system for murdering a United States federal judge.
The facts of the Harrelson family’s story are this concentrated: a son who became one of the most recognizable actors in American film and television; a father who became one of the most notorious hitmen in the modern history of American organized crime. The two men shared a birthday, a surname, and a conviction — Woody’s about acting, Charles’s about the value of a human life.
They also shared something more specific: a relationship, conducted across prison visiting rooms and letters and phone calls, that Woody chose to maintain rather than disavow. He funded his father’s legal appeals. He stood in at his father’s proxy wedding. He called Charles one of the most charming and well-read people he had ever met. And he watched his father die in a federal supermax prison in 2007, without the retrial that Woody had spent years and millions of dollars trying to secure.
This is not a story about whether fathers determine sons. It is a story about a specific man, Charles Harrelson, who killed people for money, and a specific man, Woody Harrelson, who played bartenders and drug addicts and hitmen on screen and became one of the most versatile actors of his generation. The biographical connection is real. What it means is something the record can document and the reader can assess.