Ben Stiller

The son of veteran comic actors Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, this nerdy-sexy player took any acting work he could find in his early twenties — stage, small or big screen, comedy or drama — in an effort to jumpstart his career. A brief writing/performing stint on Saturday Night Live in 1989 helped him land his own eponymous sketch-comedy series on MTV later that year, and while the show quickly fizzled, it laid the groundwork for his 1992 Fox series of the same name costarring Andy Dick and Janeane Garofalo. Although The Ben Stiller Show — which he wrote, produced, directed and starred in — only lasted one season, his skewed sensibility and pop-culture-infused humor turned him into a Gen-X darling. In 1994 he made his feature directing debut with Reality Bites, a slacker comedy in which he also costarred. From then on Stiller was omnipresent, tackling supporting and leading movie roles, TV guest spots, even appearing as himself in videos (P. Diddy's "Bad Boy for Life"). He tended to alternate between two comic characterizations — nebbishy underdog (Meet the Parents, There's Something About Mary) and testosterone-heavy villain (Dodgeball, Heavy Weights) — with a few notable exceptions (an overprotective widowed father in The Royal Tenenbaums, a junkie in Permanent Midnight) that proved, if given the chance, he could be versatile. Still, audiences seemed to prefer his stereotypical shtick. Off screen he dated a bevy of beauties (Jeanne Tripplehorn, Amanda Peet, Claire Forlani) before marrying actress Christine Taylor.