• Born November 29, 1954 · Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
• Birth name Joel David Coen

Been married to Frances McDormand since 1984.

QUOTES:

• We’ve never considered our stuff either homage or spoof. Those are things other people call it, and it’s always puzzled me that they do.
• The bigger stars we’ve worked with have been without the movie-star vanities or meshugaas that you read about and dread. [George Clooney], for example, was the opposite. He has no entourage. He’s a big movie star, but a nice guy.
• [Ethan Coen] had a nightmare of one day finding me on the set of something like The Incredible Hulk (2008), wearing a gold chain and saying, “I’ve got to eat, don’t I?”
• [Ethan Coen] once described the way we worked together as: one of us types into the computer while the other holds the spine of the book open flat. That’s why there needs to be two of us – otherwise he’s gotta type one-handed. That’s how you “collaborate” with someone else.
• [upon winning the Oscar for Best Director for No Country for Old Men (2007)] In the late ’60s, when [brother Ethan Coen] was 11 or 12, he got a suit and a briefcase and we went to the Minneapolis International Airport with a Super 8 camera and made a movie about shuttle diplomacy called “Henry Kissinger, Man on the Go”. And, honestly, what we do now doesn’t feel much different from what we were doing then.