Benjamin Edward Meara Stiller was born on November 30, 1965 in New York City, to father, comedian/actor Jerry Stiller and mother actress/comedian Anne Meara. Having both parents from the Hollywood background it didn’t take long for Stiller to get used to the lifestyle. From young age Stiller and his sister Amy Stiller would perform plays at home. At age 9, Stiller displayed interest in film making, made movies with his sister and friends on his Super 8 camera. Stiller debuted as a guest on his mother’s television series Kate McShane. Stiller enrolled as the film student at the University of California, Los Angeles but after nine months he left for New York City without hesitation to pursue his career as he could wait no longer.
After making his way through acting classes , auditioning he finally landed in the Broadway revival of John Guare’s The House of Blue Leaves. His comedic role was well recieved by the cast and the crew so he decided to make a 10-minute short called The Hustler of Money, a parody of the Martin Scorsese film The Color of Money. The short film was a hit attracting Lorne Michaels creator of Saturday Night Live. This led to Ben spending a year on the show in 1989.
Ben made his big screen debut in Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun (1987) in 1987. Demonstrating early on the multifaceted tone his career would take, he soon stepped behind the camera to direct Back to Brooklyn for MTV. The network was impressed and gave Stiller his own show, The Ben Stiller Show (1992). Afterwards seen in mediocre movies for the next few years besides stepped behind the screen to direct Reality Bites (1994) and The Cable Guy (1996) it was not until the guy starred opposite Cameron Diaz in the Farrelly brothers’ lowbrow comedy of There’s Something About Mary (1998) that he eventually strived high to strike hard the big screen.
Stiller stared in many box hit movies Meet the Parents (2000), Zoolander (2001), plus The Royal Tenenbaums (2001). Smoothly ran his film career, Ben continued to generate commercial success through his subsequent silver screen productions which all were released in 2004 and collected more than $88 million in the domestic income, namely Along Came Polly, Starsky & Hutch, Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, and Meet the Fockers. Followed it up with a voice acting stint in DreamWorks’ mega-hit animation feature of Madagascar (2005). In 2006 Stiller stared in Night at the Museum, The Mirror, Seven Day Itch. Followed by Used Guys and The Persuaders in 2007 release. Stiller again returned in the Dream works animation Madagascar 2 in 2008.
Stiller dated several actresses during his early television and film career, including Jeanne Tripplehorn, Calista Flockhart, and Amanda Peet. In May 2000, Stiller married Christine Taylor at an oceanfront ceremony in Kauai, Hawaii. The couple have two children, a daughter, Ella Olivia, born April 9, 2002, and a son, Quinlin Dempsey, born July 10, 2005.
