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Albert Brooks

Albert Brooks (born July 22, 1947 as Albert Lawrence Einstein) is an Academy Award nominated American actor, writer, comedian and director.

Albert Brooks Biography

Albert Brooks Early life

Brooks was born Albert Lawrence Einstein in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, California to a Jewish American family. Albert Brooks's father, Harry Einstein, was a comedian who performed on Eddie Cantor's radio program and was known as Parkyarkarkus. Albert Brooks's mother was actress Thelma Leeds (born Thelma Goodman). Albert Brooks's brother is Bob Einstein, better known by Albert Brooks's stage name "Super Dave Osborne".

Brooks grew up among showbusiness royalty in southern California, attending high school with Richard Dreyfuss and Rob Reiner.

Albert Brooks Early career

Brooks attended Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh, but dropped out after one year to focus on Albert Brooks's comedy career. Albert Brooks changed Albert Brooks's surname from Einstein (to avoid confusion with the famous scientist) and began a stand-up comedy career that quickly made Albert Brooks a regular on variety and talk shows during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Albert Brooks's onstage persona, that of an egotistical, nervous comic, influenced other comedians, including Steve Martin, Martin Mull and Andy Kaufman.

After two successful comedy albums, Comedy Minus One (1974) and the Grammy Award-nominated A Star is Bought (1975), Brooks left the standup circuit to try Albert Brooks's hand as a filmmaker; Albert Brooks's first film, The Famous Comedians School, was a satiric short which appeared on PBS and was an early example of the mockumentary sub-genre.

In 1975, Albert Brooks directed six short films for the first season of NBC's Saturday Night Live:

In 1976 Albert Brooks appeared in Albert Brooks's first mainstream film role, in Scorsese's landmark Taxi Driver (Scorsese allowed Brooks to improvise much of Albert Brooks's dialogue). The role reflected Brooks's decision to move to Los Angeles to get into the film business.

Brooks directed Albert Brooks's first feature film, Real Life, in 1979. The film, in which Brooks obnoxiously films a typical suburban family in an effort to win both an Oscar and a Nobel Prize, was a sendup of PBS's An American Family documentary. Brooks also made a brief cameo in the film Private Benjamin (1980), starring Goldie Hawn.

Albert Brooks 1980s'1990s

Through the 1980s and 1990s, Brooks co-wrote (with longtime collaborator Monica Johnson), directed and starred in a series of moderately-successful comedies, playing variants on Albert Brooks's standard neurotic and self-obsessed character. These include 1981's Modern Romance, where Brooks played a film editor desperate to win back Albert Brooks's ex-girlfriend (Kathryn Harrold). The film received a limited release and ultimately grossed under $3 million domestically, but was well received by critics, with one reviewer commenting that the film was "not Brooks at Albert Brooks's best, but still amusing". Albert Brooks's best-received film, Lost in America (1985), featured Brooks and Julie Hagerty as a couple who leave their yuppie lifestyle, drop out of society and live in a motor home, only to find the disadvantages of poverty.

Brooks's Defending Your Life (1991) placed Albert Brooks's lead character in the afterlife, put on trial to justify Albert Brooks's human failings and to determine Albert Brooks's cosmic fate. Critics responded to the offbeat premise and the surprising chemistry between Brooks and Meryl Streep as Albert Brooks's post-death love interest. Albert Brooks's later efforts did not find large audiences, but still retained Brooks's touch as a filmmaker. Albert Brooks garnered positive reviews for Mother (1996), which starred Brooks as a middle-aged writer moving back home to resolve Albert Brooks's tensions with Albert Brooks's mother (Debbie Reynolds). 1999's The Muse featured Brooks as a down-and-out Hollywood screenwriter using the services of an authentic muse (Sharon Stone) for inspiration.

Brooks also acted in other writers' and directors' films during the 1980s and 1990s. Albert Brooks moved into the horror genre in one of the stories in Twilight Zone: The Movie, playing an unsuspecting driver who picks up a suspicious hitchhiker (Dan Aykroyd). In James L. Brooks's hit Broadcast News (1987), Albert Brooks was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor as an insecure, supremely ethical network TV reporter, who offers the rhetorical question, "Wouldn't this be a great world if insecurity and desperation made us more attractive?" Albert Brooks also won positive notices for Albert Brooks's role in 1998's Out of Sight, playing an untrustworthy banker and ex-convict.

Albert Brooks 2000s

Brooks received positive reviews for Albert Brooks's portrayal of a dying retail store owner who befriends disillusioned teen Leelee Sobieski in My First Mister (2001), and Albert Brooks has appeared as a guest voice on The Simpsons five times during its run (always under the name A. Brooks). Brooks continued Albert Brooks's voiceover work in Disney and Pixar's Finding Nemo (2003), as the voice of "Marlin" the clown fish; Nemo is Brooks's largest grossing film to date.

In 2005, Albert Brooks's film Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World drew controversy for its title. Sony Pictures eventually dropped the film altogether because of their desire to change the title. Subsequently, Warner Independent Pictures purchased the film and gave it a limited release in January 2006; the film received mixed reviews and a low box office gross. The movie goes back to the days of Brooks's Real Life, as Brooks once again plays himself, a filmmaker commissioned by the U.S. government to see what makes the Muslim people laugh, thus sending Albert Brooks on a tour throughout Muslim countries.

Albert Brooks Private life

Brooks was romantically linked to singer Linda Ronstadt and actresses Carrie Fisher, Julie Hagerty and Kathryn Harrold. Albert Brooks married Kimberly Shlain, an artist (Kimberly Brooks) Albert Brooks met while filming Mother, on March 15, 1997; the couple have two children, Jacob Eli (born 1998) and Claire Elizabeth (born 2000).

Brooks is a resident of Los Angeles.

Much of the content on this page was obtained from the Wikipedia, which is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License