Kevin Spacey (born Kevin Spacey Fowler, 26 July 1959, in South Orange, New Jersey) is an American actor and director, and one of the most decorated screen performers of the 1990s and 2000s. He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for The Usual Suspects (1995) and the Academy Award for Best Actor for American Beauty (1999), and later played Francis Underwood in the Netflix political drama House of Cards.
His long film career also includes Se7en (1995), L.A. Confidential (1997) and K-PAX (2001), alongside extensive stage work; he served as artistic director of London's Old Vic theatre between 2004 and 2015.
The Welsh connection behind this entry rests on his stage surname. While still at school, Spacey adopted "Spacey" — originally spelled "Spacy" — as his professional name, and several biographical sources describe it as a name with Welsh roots carried by an earlier ancestor. Accounts differ on exactly which branch of the family it comes from, and it is separate from his maternal grandfather, Allan August Knutson, who was of Swedish descent rather than Welsh, correcting an earlier claim on this site.
Reader comments attached to the original version of this entry speculated about a Cardiff hotel connection; that claim has not been verified by any published source and is preserved below as reader discussion rather than confirmed fact.