Perhaps that early experience of neglect explains why Dafoe has so often been an obliging actor, ready to do anything to accommodate a director's fruity demands.
Maybe – and it's a theory that would get me evicted from Freudian analysis 101 – the abandoned boy became the inveterate pleaser of adults. My dad was a surgeon, my mom a nurse, and they were always out working. When Willem Dafoe was a little boy in Appleton, Wisconsin, he shut himself in a closet for two days.