Ben Stiller

Ben Stiller is an American actor, comedian, writer, producer and director whose career links sketch comedy, studio farce, independent film and prestige television. Born Benjamin Edward Meara Stiller in New York City in 1965, he grew up in a performing family: his parents, Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, were a celebrated comedy duo and actors. Stiller began making short films and comic sketches early, and his appetite for parody shaped his first major platform, The Ben Stiller Show. Although the series had a short run, it won a Primetime Emmy Award for writing and established him as a performer-director with a strong visual comic sensibility.

Stiller's feature directing career began with Reality Bites, the 1994 Generation X comedy-drama in which he also acted. He followed with The Cable Guy, a darker studio comedy that later earned a reputation as an unusually sharp and uneasy satire of media obsession. As an actor, he became a major comedy lead in the late 1990s and early 2000s through There's Something About Mary, Meet the Parents, Zoolander, Along Came Polly, DodgeBall: A True Underdog Story and Starsky & Hutch. His screen characters often combine anxiety, vanity and wounded sincerity, whether he is playing Greg Focker's escalating social panic, Derek Zoolander's absurd innocence or White Goodman's grotesque competitiveness.

Stiller has repeatedly balanced performance with authorship. Zoolander and Tropic Thunder are among his signature writer-director-star projects, both built around show-business satire and broad character comedy. Tropic Thunder also showed his ability to manage large ensemble comedy while pushing Hollywood self-parody into darker territory. He directed and starred in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, a more sentimental adventure-drama, and has produced a wide range of film and television projects through Red Hour Productions.