Date of Birth

5 December 1979, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA

Birth Name

Vincent Paul Kartheiser

Nickname

Vinnie

Height

5' 11" (1.8 m)

Mini Biography

Known to audiences worldwide as spitfire advertising executive "Pete Campbell" on Matthew Weiner's Golden Globe, Emmy, and SAG Award-winning drama series Mad Men (2007), Vincent Kartheiser has actually been acting since he was a teen. Starting with Untamed Heart (1993), alongside Marisa Tomei, Kartheiser accumulated an impressive number of credits during his youth, inclusive of Little Big League (1994), Iron Will (1994), The Indian in the Cupboard (1995), and Alaska (1996). He has since appeared in the likes of Another Day in Paradise (1998) with James Woods and Melanie Griffith; Crime + Punishment in Suburbia (2000); and most recently, the sci-fi thriller In Time (2011), which reunited him with his Alpha Dog (2006) co-star, Justin Timberlake.

During his Mad Men (2007) hiatus, Kartheiser filmed the indie, Beach Pillows (2014), and performed the lead role in "Death of the Novel", which brought him back to his stage roots, that originated at the renown Guthrie theatre.

Kartheiser previously starred on Joss Whedon's Angel (1999), and has guest-starred in numerous other series, including ER (1994), BBC America's Money (2010), and The Cleveland Show (2009). He's also lent his voice to the big screen's Rango (2011) and will next lead the cast of FOX's High School USA! (2013).

A native of Minneapolis, MN, Kartheiser was named after Vincent van Gogh and grew up surrounded by his works.

Trivia

• Has four sisters and one brother.
• Failed the 9th grade.
• Born to Janet Marie Gruye and James Ralph Kartheiser, he has four sisters, Andrea, Colette, Elise, and Theresa and a brother, Nathan.
• Is the youngest out of 6 siblings.
• Before he got married, he told The Guardian (UK) that he often wore a wedding ring in his private life so that he "can flash it to warn people off if [he] need[s] to," and that he has "never been monogamous" in any relationship.
• In an April 2010 interview with The Guardian (UK) newspaper, Kartheiser revealed that after experiencing some of the material excesses of Hollywood (such as awards shows where already-wealthy people receive gift bags full of expensive free items), he started a process of shedding his possessions that includes selling or giving away most of what he owns. He told the interviewer that he now no longer owns a car (even though he lives in Los Angeles, a city that is notoriously difficult to get around in without one) and he moved into a very small one-room house that doesn't even have a toilet in it.
• He got engaged to Alexis Bledel (March 20, 2013) and then married in June 2014.
• Minneapolis, Minnesota: Starring in stage version of 'Pride and Prejudice' as the romantic lead, Mr. Darcy, at the Guthrie Theater in his hometown where he got is start as an actor [July 2013]
• He has German, Polish, Finnish, Swedish, and Luxembourgian ancestry. His matrilineal great-grandmother, Stella Louise Richter, immigrated from Blonie, Poland, with her parents, Stanley Richter and Anna Petrowski.
• Good friends with Monica Keena.
• A deleted scene from Another Day in Paradise (1998) with Natasha Gregson Wagner, involving fellatio and rough sex, had to be cut from the movie in order to avoid an NC-17 rating. The scene is included in the uncensored director's cut on the flipside of the DVD.
• For the last two seasons of Mad Men (2007), he shaved the front of his head in order to make his character Pete Campbell look aged.

Trademarks:

• Youthful appearance
  
• Rich voice
  
• Bright blue eyes
  

Quotes

• I think it's healthy to hate. I think it's extremely healthy, because without hate, you cannot see love. Without red, there wouldn't be any green. That's not a very good metaphor but, you know, it's the same.
• You and I have different definitions of deep.
• When you've done something for a really long time you start to find out things about it that you've never imagined. It's like a complex molecule. And if you go to Oxford and you become a scientist and you start studying the molecule and at first you have a discovery about it. And at first you are like "oh yeah I've figured this out." But if you study it long enough, you realize that there's an entire universe in there and no matter how long you live, you will never stop figuring out things about that molecule. And I think that it's like that with things in our life.
• And when the bottom drops out from underneath us in life it's miraculous how we're reminded that we are spiritual beings, that we have a soul; this immense, powerful being inside of us that's so much more than a collection of thoughts or ideas or things or people around us. That it's kind of this unbreakable, immeasurable force that's unexplainable and uh, it's reassuring.
• One of our goals as actors, well, this is my theory, is to allow others to project themselves onto us whether it's good or bad.
• You don't really comprehend how much those goals or those dreams are just ideas in your head. They are not real places where you can inhabit. A dream is a great thing but it is not an end thing. It is just another step.