Cooper was born on July 9, 1951, in Kansas City, Missouri, the son of Charles and Mary Ann née Walton Cooper. He has an older brother, Chuck. His father was a United States Air Force physician and a cattleman, and his mother was a homemaker. Both of his parents were from Texas. Cooper grew up in the suburbs of Kansas City, and spent his summers at his family's cattle ranch, about fifteen miles west of Leavenworth, Kansas. The family moved to Las Vegas, Nevada, Phoenix, Arizona, and Houston, Texas as his father was redeployed. While attending Southwest High School in Kansas City, he worked for a local theatre company, building sets and using his carpentry background. He became the shop foreman for another repertory company after he graduated high school. He also considered helping his father raise cattle for a living. He served in the U.S. Coast Guard Reserve.
He attended the University of Missouri, where he enrolled in the theatre program, having initially majored in set design. He changed his major to acting during his sophomore year in order to address his "overpowering shyness." He recalled in a 1996 interview with The Philadelphia Inquirer, "I started going in and watching some shows at the theater department. I started taking theater classes and auditioned for plays. And once I got into it, it was pretty immediate. I really felt right, felt at home." Cooper also took dance classes at Stephens College.
He moved to New York City in 1976 after graduating from the University of Missouri. He shared a one-bedroom railroad flat with four other aspiring actors and dancers while living there. He supported himself by renovating apartments,, as well as in construction, as a janitor, and a chauffeur. He studied with Stella Adler and Wynn Handman at the same time. Prior to his film debut in Matewan (1987), Cooper had spent twelve years doing stage work with the Actors Theater of Louisville and the Seattle Repertory. He appeared in the London revival of Sweet Bird of Youth in 1985. He played Ty Cobb in Cobb in 1989 at the Yale Repertory Theatre.
His notable later performances include: Money Train, as a psychotic pyromaniac who terrifies toll booth operators; Lone Star, in a leading role as a Texas sheriff charged with solving a decades-old case; as Deputy Dwayne Looney in director Joel Schumacher's 1996 film A Time to Kill; as Frank Booker in 1998's The Horse Whisperer; and as a closeted homophobic Marine Corps colonel in American Beauty, a role that garnered him a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. To get into character, Cooper said he "depended on a friend who'd fought in Vietnam. I asked him to go deep. What would this man have done? What would be on his walls? On his desk?"
He appeared in three acclaimed films in 2005: Capote, Syriana, and Jarhead, which reunited him with American Beauty director Sam Mendes and October Sky actor Jake Gyllenhaal. He acted in the thriller Breach, playing real-life FBI agent and traitor Robert Hanssen. He commented that Breach was "the first studio film where they've considered me the lead [actor]". He appeared as a government agent in dangerous territory in the action thriller The Kingdom in 2007, and voiced the character Douglas in the film adaptation of Maurice Sendak's book, Where the Wild Things Are (2009).
At the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, Cooper appeared alongside Ben Affleck in The Company Men, early reviews of which praised Cooper's performance as "pitch-perfect". He appeared in The Muppets in 2011 as Tex Richman, the antagonistic oil tycoon who is unable to laugh. He performed the rap and dance number "Let's Talk About Me". He played Charles Aiken, Sr. in August: Osage County alongside an all-star cast that included Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts in 2013. He portrayed Norman Osborn in the 2014 film The Amazing Spider-Man 2. He appeared in an uncredited role in Ben Affleck's crime drama Live by Night, which was released in December 2016.[citation needed]
Cooper met his future wife, Marianne Leone, in 1979 at an acting class in New York City. On their first date, she helped him carry sheet rock up eight flights of stairs. He later said "that's when I knew this was the girl for me." They married in July 1983. Their son, Jesse Lanier Cooper, was born three months prematurely in October 1987. Three days after he was born, Jesse suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and developed cerebral palsy. Jesse was eventually mainstreamed into Silver Lake Regional High School, where he became an honor student.
Cooper recalled in a 2003 interview with The Morning Call, "[Jesse] is the best thing that ever happened to us. He's in a wheelchair and he communicates only by computer, but he's taught me so much because he's just so incredibly focused. Now he's in a regular school, which we fought to get him into. He's an honors student, and he's doing great." Jesse suffered a sudden unexpected death in epilepsy on January 3, 2005. A memorial fund was set up in his name, the Jesse Cooper Foundation. Cooper has said that the death of his son has helped him understand several characters he played, such as Charles Aiken in August: Osage County (2013) and Phil Eastwood in Demolition (2015).
