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Biography
He was born Benjamin Stiller
on the 30th of October, 1965, in New York City, the second child of
Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, daughter Amy having arrived two years
earlier. Anne, born in 1929, had come to motherhood fairly late, due to
a burgeoning comedy partnership with her husband. Being a couple of
mixed religion (Anne had converted to Jerry's Jewish faith at marriage
but was raised Irish Catholic), they had formed an act playing upon
their differences and, as the loving but waspish Hershey Horowitz and
Mary Elizabeth Doyle, had become hugely popular. Indeed they had a
residency on the Ed Sullivan Show, appearing every two months and
eventually appearing no less than 36 times.
Many kids feel they have to
compete with their parents' past achievements, but young Ben had to
contend with a success that just kept coming. Anne had won an Obie back
in 1955 for an off-Broadway performance in Madchen In Uniform, but that
was just an aperitif. There'd be movie appearances - in the Jack Lemmon
comedy The Out-Of-Towners, and Lovers And Other Strangers, which saw the
debut of Diane Keaton.
After the Ed Sullivan Show,
in 1976 she would be Emmy nominated for the TV series Kate McShane,
playing the emotional, hard-hitting lawyer of the title. The next year
would see a Golden Globe nomination for her part in the comedy series
Rhoda. From 1979 to '82 she and Jerry would co-host HBO's Sneak Preview,
an hour-long show telling the nation what was coming up on the
goggle-box. At the same time she'd play the English teacher in the movie
Fame, and enjoy a run in Archie Bunker's Place, nabbing two more Emmy
nominations.
1986 would see her re-paired
with Jerry for the Stiller And Meara Show. 1992 would bring a
long-running part as Peggy Moody in the super-soap All My Children. '93
would see a Tony nomination for her onstage efforts opposite Liam Neeson
in Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie, and there'd be a host of other TV
guest appearances in the likes of ALF, Oz, Murphy Brown and Sex And The
City, yet another Emmy nomination coming for her performance in
Homicide: Life On The Streets.
Jerry, meanwhile, was no slouch either. He, too, made an endless
succession of guest appearances in popular shows, like Rhoda, Hart To
Hart and The Love Boat, as well as in high profile films like The Taking
Of Pelham 123. Like his wife, he also made the occasional foray into
"serious" theatre, the pair of them having made their bones
during the Golden Age of TV theatre in New York in the Fifties. He
performed in Hurlyburly alongside William Hurt and Sigourney Weaver and
1997 would see him on Broadway in Chekov's Three Sisters, alongside Amy
Irving, Lili Taylor and Eric Stoltz. Before this, though, he had raged
and sniped his way back into the public consciousness as George
Costanza's father Frank in the enormo-hit Seinfeld.
So this was the background Ben Stiller was born into and grew up with.
Naturally, it would be a heavy, heavy influence on his character and his
future. Amy and Ben were not kept away from their parents' work and
quickly took to entertaining themselves and others with little plays,
performing songs from Jesus Christ Superstar, Ben borrowing Amy's tights
for their attempts at Shakespeare. Watching his parents rehearse, he recognized
the wit and work required to build a successful show. And also, seeing
them switch into character on and off screen, he did not long possess a
childish belief in the "reality" of movies and TV series.
One thing he particularly appreciated was his parents' ability to make
people laugh. The Stillers' Upper West Side apartment was often packed
with passing celebrities and young Ben would do his utmost to entertain
them. He'd attend the outrageous parties held in the same apartment
block by Peter Max, a flamboyant fashion designer and denizen of Studio
54 (Anne and Jerry's New Year get-togethers were also legendary) and
he'd hob-nob with the great and good. Ben also recalls enjoying the
benefits of the extra festivals brought by his parents' religious
leanings.
There'd be 8 days of
presents, plus Christmas goodies, plus gifts for his birthday at the end
of November - he remembers it as "a materialistic feeding
frenzy". He'd enjoy the adventure of traveling with his parents to
summer stock, and also be excited by TV appearances of his own. At age 8
he joined his parents onscreen, along with Amy playing Chopsticks on
violins, when Anne and Jerry co-hosted The Mike Douglas Show. A year or
so later he'd turn up in Kate McShane.
But there was a downside,
too. Jerry and Anne were clearly very busy and Ben would later mention
that he sometimes felt that the only time he ever saw them was on The Ed
Sullivan Show. Thus relegated to a member of their vast audience, he
must have felt they were only giving him as much joy as they gave
everyone else. That's hardly going to make a kid feel special.
Along with his sister he was
often looked after by Jamaican housekeeper Hazel. A mother of 7, she'd
sometimes bring a few of her kids over, or have Ben and Amy come stay at
hers. Beyond this, he was bullied quite badly and felt like a total
misfit. He would later admit he was not well-adjusted, from 13 to 19
having a particularly bad time. He was not aided by a condition he later
named as "bi-polar manic depression", a problem that runs in
his family.
For a kid as creative as young Ben, both his joys and problems would
prove an inspiration. Given a Super 8 camera at the age of 10, he
immediately set about making movies, usually starring himself, Amy and a
few friends. Being so badly bullied and considering himself both
physically ugly and a social outcast, many of these shorts featured shy,
nerdy Ben being put upon by good-looking jock-types then exacting bloody
vengeance.
Spending so much time alone,
he watched TV, perhaps too much TV, losing himself in shows like Starsky
And Hutch, The Partridge Family, The Bionic Woman and the many detective
series of the time. These would be reflected in the titles of his own
revenge fantasies, each carrying names like Murder In The Park and They
Called It Murder. It's been suggested that his 1994 directorial debut,
Reality Bites, was less a study of the dichotomies facing Generation X
than a disguised attack on the beautiful people he so loathed as a
child. Other shorts he made as a kid would be satires of the popular
movies of the day - Jaws, Airport, The Poseidon Adventure - TV shows and
adverts. This was the idea behind the ever-popular Mad Magazine and John
Landis' Kentucky Fried Movie, a hit in 1977, and it would eventually
give Ben his breakthrough into the big-time.
So, from an early age, film was Ben's chosen subject. Thus on graduation
from High School in 1983, he enrolled at UCLA, majoring in film studies.
Unfortunately, perhaps because he wasn't ready for a life away from his
family, perhaps because he was unsure of his abilities and his goals,
perhaps because he couldn't stand the superficial beauty and
manipulative shenanigans of LA's residents, he stood it for only 9
months. He dropped out and returned to New York, mooching off his
parents, working as a waiter and studying at the famed Actors' Studio, a
school suited to his precocious talent and angry temperament. At the
Studio, he slowly graduated from sweeping floors to working as stage
manager on a Norman Mailer play based on the life of Marilyn Monroe.
After serving this
apprenticeship, his mother's theatre connections scored him a role in a
Tony-winning 1985 revival of John Guare's The House Of Blue Leaves. In
itself, this would be good experience, allowing him to hone the
techniques learned at the Actors' Studio. More important, though, was
his extra-curricular activity. Still keen on filming, he cooked up a
short satirical documentary with one of the show's stars, John Mahoney,
later to find world fame as Frasier's longsuffering ex-cop dad. Shown to
the rest of the cast and crew, it went down a storm, encouraging Stiller
and Mahoney to try something more ambitious. So, staying true to Ben's
habit of spoofing the big movies of the day, they put together The
Hustler Of Money, taking off Martin Scorsese's Oscar-winning follow-up
to The Hustler, The Colour Of Money.
The short, with Mahoney playing Paul Newman's Fast Eddie Felson and Ben
adding extra ditziness to Tom
Cruise's already manic Vince, soon came to the attention of Saturday
Night Live producer Lorne Michaels, who not only screened it in 1987 but
brought Ben in as an addition to the cast for the 1988-89 season. It
could have been the big breakthrough. Sadly, it wasn't. Ben had hoped to
make more short movies for the show but was turned down (Michaels had a
hierarchy to consider) and left after only five shows.
It didn't really matter, as Ben was already spreading his wings on the
small and big screens. By the end of 1987, he'd appeared on the box in
episodes of Kate And Allie and Miami Vice. He'd also made his cinematic
debut in Hot Pursuit. Here preppie John Cusack was trying to join his
girlfriend and her parents on a Caribbean holiday when they were
kidnapped by pirates led by a scheming Jerry Stiller, Ben playing his
real father's annoyingly precocious son.
Next came an American
Playhouse screening of The House Of Blue Leaves, where zoo attendant
Mahoney's plans to become a songwriter are complicated by his wife, his
mistress, and by son Ben, who goes AWOL from Fort Dix and plots to blow
up the Pope in Yankee Stadium. There'd also be a brief appearance in
Steven Spielberg's epic Empire Of The Sun, JG Ballard's autobiographical
tale of life under the Japanese once they'd occupied Shanghai in 1941.
More was to come, and quickly. As SNL came and went, he appeared in
Fresh Horses, where rich college boy Andrew McCarthy becomes dangerously
embroiled with rough-girl Molly Ringwald, Ben playing the best friend
who accompanies him on his initial search for dirty fun. Following this
would be That's Adequate, a mockumentary about a fictional Hollywood
studio featuring Ben's entire nuclear family. Then there'd be a further
brief part in Next Of Kin where the Mob kill Chicago cop Patrick
Swayze's brother and his redneck family come in from the country to set
things a-right. Ben would play gangster Lawrence Isabella, a city boy
not used to being shot at with arrows.
Really, though, Stiller was
more keen on bringing his own work to the screen and, in 1989, put
together Elvis Stories, a short film having fun with outrageous tabloid
tales of alleged sightings of the King. For this, Stiller would, as
ever, draw on friends and family. Amy would appear, as would John Cusack
and his New Crime Theatre cohort Jeremy Piven. Mike Myers, Ben's fellow
extra in that ill-fated SNL try-out, would show up, as would comedians
Jeff Kahn and Andy Dick, later to feature in many of Ben's productions.
The film was a great success, and led to Ben making another, Back To
Brooklyn, for MTV. They loved it and, just a year after missing out at
SNL, he had his own weekly show.
Written in collaboration with Jeff Kahn, The Ben Stiller Show was a
behind-the-scenes look at TV comedy, with director Ben continually
getting grief from Kahn and the rest of the crew. It was popular, but
not popular enough, and would last just one season. Fortunately, the
show's (and Ben's) potential were spotted by producers for the Fox
network and they signed him for another series, run in 1992.
This saw Ben return to his
satirical strengths, parodying TV (Beverly Hills 90210), rock music (Springsteen)
and, of course, movies (Last Of The Mohicans). It featured a host of
guest appearances by the likes of Roseanne, Garry Shandling and Sarah
Jessica Parker, as well as Ben's early TV heroes, like David Cassidy,
Adam West and James Doohan. But yet again the ratings were not good,
indeed the show was near last, and some of the reviews were vicious, one
calling Ben a "well-connected Hollywood brat". This Ben
Stiller Show would last only 12 episodes.
But this wasn't the end of the show's influence on Ben's career. For a
start, after its cancellation it won an Emmy, beating both SNL and In
Living Colour to the prize. It also became a serious cult hit on repeat
showings. Beyond this, it allowed Ben to cement a team of collaborators
like Andy Dick, Jeff Kahn, John F. O'Donoghue, former SNL writer Bob
Odenkirk, and Janeane Garofalo, whom Ben had met in a Hollywood deli
when he'd moved there after the SNL debacle.
Along with his family, these
people would all feature time and again in his later work. Oh, and the
show would also bring a longtime girlfriend in guest artist Jeanne
Tripplehorn, about to break into the big time by being ravaged from
behind by Michael Douglas in Basic Instinct. The couple would continue
an on-off relationship for six years.
Inbetween the two Ben Stiller Shows, his movie output was not of the
highest class. Stella, a remake of the 1937 Barbara Stanwyk hit Stella
Dallas, saw Bette Midler as a single mother struggling to bring up a
difficult daughter in the painful knowledge that the kid's now-rich dad
can give her a better life - Ben played the sincere preppie who wins the
young girl's heart. Next came Working Tra and his first meaty role as a
cleaner in a brokerage firm who, being a financial wizard on the sly,
helps fellow scrubber George Carlin scour the bins for info and thus
makes a fortune in surreptitious insider dealing.
Two more roles would follow
in 1992. First there was Highway To Hell, a horror comedy penned by
Brian "LA Confidential" Helgeland. This saw Kirsty Swanson
kidnapped by a cop from Hell and taken to the Infernal Regions to marry
Satan, her new husband facing many a danger and historical lunatic in
his subsequent rescue attempt. Again, the entire Stiller clan would crop
up in cameo, Amy as Cleopatra, Anne as Medea and Ben as Attila The Hun.
There'd be a further cameo for Ben, as a protagonist in a pie fight, in
Scott Spiegel's The Nutt House, a wild comedy so flawed that original
writer Sam Raimi had his name taken from the credits.
Following the demise of the second Ben Stiller Show, Ben limited himself
to TV guest appearances. The rest of the time he spent writing,
recruiting and raising finance for his first major directorial project,
Reality Bites, released in 1994. Produced by Danny DeVito and featuring
all of Ben's trusty cohorts (bar his dad), this saw Winona
Ryder as a wannabe film-maker, documenting her friends lives as they
move from college into a harsh job market. Ethan Hawke would play her
cynical, drop-out room-mate who's driven to express his love for her
when she engages in an affair with Stiller's corporate MTV-style
executive.
It was a well-made movie but
very odd in that the characters portrayed made Stiller's intentions
unclear. Many saw it as a picture of idealistic Gen X kids struggling
against society's demeaning but all-powerful corporate force. But some
noted that Stiller's Michael Grates, though considered the enemy by
Ryder and Hawke, was by far the movie's most interesting character.
Indeed, the rest of them were really just whiny and inept ingrates. So
was this an attack by the now-successful Stiller on those who'd abused
and excluded him in his youth? If it was, it was an extraordinary
subversion of the youth-movie genre.
Before his next directorial project, Stiller dived into another series
of acting roles. In Disney's Heavyweights, directed by Steven Brill and
using much of Brill's Mighty Ducks cast, Ben's parents Anne and Jerry
played the fat-friendly managers of a summer camp for obese kids. All is
fine until Ben, coming on like a cross between Arnold Schwarzenegger and
Freddy Krueger, arrives as a fanatical fitness coach. Next there'd be a
brief cameo as a male orderly looking after Adam Sandler's grandma in
Happy Gilmore. Then there'd be If Lucy Fell, where flat-mates Eric
Schaeffer and Sarah Jessica Parker decide to throw themselves off
Brooklyn Bridge if they don't find love in 28 days, Schaeffer trying it
on with Elle Macpherson and Parker with crazed action painter Ben.
After this would come another cult success with David O. Russell's
Flirting With Disaster. Here Ben took the lead as a neurotic
entomologist who can't make love to his wife, Patricia Arquette or name
their new baby until he discovers the identity of his birth parents. So,
along with adoption agency psychiatrist Tea Leoni, as well as his
increasingly jealous wife, he crosses the country, following a series of
bad leads as the search grows hilariously complicated.
Now came that directorial
follow-up as Ben stepped up into the big league with The Cable Guy. Much
was expected. Not only was star Jim
Carrey on a run after Ace Ventura 2 and Liar, Liar, but the
producers were so convinced of his bankability that they paid him a
massive $20 million, hiking the budget up to $47 million. Again, Ben
called in many of his own team - Amy, Dick, Garofalo - and indeed
expanded it by beginning working relationships with Jack
Black and, more importantly, Owen Wilson.
The movie saw Matthew Broderick turned down when he proposes to his
fiancee. Moving into a bachelor pad, he soon encounters Carrey as the
titular cable guy, who comes round to sort out his viewing requirements.
Unfortunately, Carrey, disturbed and needy beyond belief, takes it upon
himself to rearrange Broderick's whole life for the better. He wants to
be friends, big bosom buddies and, when Broderick shies away from his
forceful advances he enters a terrible downward spiral of bitterness and
despair.
Clearly, this was not what Carrey's fans were expecting and, though the
initial take was fine, word-of-mouth saw the movie's box office fall
rapidly away, with an eventual US take of just $60 million. Thus it was
deemed a drastic failure, despite the fact that, after Jerry Maguire, it
was Sony Pictures best seller of 1996.
For years this bad
reputation would stick, but eventually critics would come to accept the
movie for what it was, an extremely dark and really quite moving comedy
featuring Carey's finest performance to date - a performance that would
ease him into the "serious" roles that followed. Like The Ben
Stiller Show before it, it had been judged on what is was not, rather
than what it was. Ben was now seen as a classy director, but one so edgy
that no one would front him any money.
Still enjoying a happy relationship with MTV, that same year Stiller
would be invited to host the VH1 Fashion Awards. Ordinarily, this would
involve turning up, reading the auto-cue and departing with a wad of
cash, but Ben is not one to come unprepared. For the show, along with
Drake Sather, another SNL writer, he put together a short movie
featuring a new character, Derek Zoolander, a male model known for his
stare of pure blue steel. It proved such a success he prepared a second
instalment for the 1997 Awards, with Zoolander this time running a
university for his posing peers. When four years later Derek was given
his own movie, both shorts would appear on the DVD.
1998 would see Stiller's big comedy breakthrough. It would also see him
fully utilising that Actors' Studio training in a couple of hard-hitting
and controversial dramas. First came Zero Effect, a kind of zany update
of the Sherlock Holmes stories with Bill Pullman as the brilliant but
painfully neurotic private dick Daryl Zero. Ben would play Steve Arlo,
Zero's Watson, who gets the pair involved in a blackmail case affecting
shady millionaire Ryan O'Neal.
After this came Ben's first
major hit, the Farrelly brothers' gross-out smash There's Something
About Mary. The story was simple enough. High school geek Ben loves
beautiful schoolmate Cameron
Diaz, but it is not to be. Years later, still besotted, he hires PD
Matt Dillon to track her down. He does, but likes her so much he tells
Stiller she's become a beast. Cue havoc as all the boys try to con their
way into her heart. Simple. But most people don't recall the story, they
recall the outrageous set-pieces.
Who could forget the young
Stiller, nervous and proud in goofy braces and gaudy suit, about to take
his unlikely date Diaz to the prom, then getting his todger caught in
his fly? In her parents' house. With the fire brigade being called. One
cack-handed heave and "We got a BLEEDER!" The embarrassment
was incredible. Then there was the later date, when the older Stiller
decides to improve his chances of impressing Diaz in the sack with a
quick pre-dinner knuckle shuffle. You know the rest - Diaz in the
restaurant with her semen-gelled hair was perhaps the pinnacle of all
those Nineties gross-out comedies.
Yet Stiller's other two 1998 movies were far from a barrel of laughs.
Indeed, Neil La Bute's Your Friends And Neighbours was a painfully
unflinching exploration of modern selfishness and the death of loving
relationships. Here Ben's shacked up with Catherine Keener, but his
habits annoy her, so they both going looking for affection elsewhere,
she with Nastassja Kinski, he with his best friend's partner. Trouble
is, they have no empathy for anyone else and thus find only sex, which
makes their self-absorption only deeper.
It was mercilessly unflinching stuff and proof positive that Stiller
could cut it in the darkest of comedies. His hilariously/embarrassingly
poor sexual technique caused one reviewer to call him "the most
fearless comic performer in American movies". More evidence of his
acting abilities would come with his next film, Permanent Midnight where
he acted out the real-life story of Jerry Stahl, a successful Hollywood
writer ruined by heroin.
It was another impressive
performance with Ben exhibiting all the impatience of withdrawal,
stealing from his friends, seeking drugs everywhere and shooting up all
over. For his research, Stiller would spend a lot of time with Stahl,
visiting his old haunts, meeting practising junkies, examining the
process. Stahl would describe him as "a really, really, really dark
guy" and the pair would continue to work together. While waiting
for Permanent Midnight's green light, they put together a script for
What Makes Sammy Run, originally penned by Bud Schulberg, author of On
The Waterfront. This would feature a Machiavellian office boy who
eventually becomes studio boss - Ben would first read it while in
Hawaii, visiting Jeanne Tripplehorn on the set of Waterworld.
Continuing to make a splash
for MTV, Ben hosted another of their award shows in 1998, this time the
Music Video awards (his video this time would take the rise out of the
Backstreet Boys). Bouncing onstage, he souped up the crowd then gave
ridiculously sincere thanks to his corporate paymasters. Had success
gone to his head? Had he lost that famous edge? Had he, gulp, sold out?
No chance. Behind him on a giant video screen, his father appeared
shouting "Ben! Ben! You're tanking!" Ben span round,
apparently horrified that his showbiz forebear should taunt him at this
critical moment. "This is a big night for me! I've worked very hard
to get here, OK?" he complained. "Ca-ca!" roared Jerry
"Getting your penis caught in your zipper is what got you
here!"
It was brilliant, cutting and gratifyingly self-deprecating. It was also
correct that Stiller should share such a moment with his family. Their
influence upon him had been huge. Indeed, when at High School he dropped
acid with his friends he actually called his parents to tell them what
he had done. Weird, eh?
1999 would see a further burst of activity, with a series of cameos. In
The Suburbans, record exec Jennifer
Love Hewitt would attempt to revive the career of a group of
Eighties one-hit wonders, Ben and his father Jerry popping up as pushy
biz types. SNL's Will Ferrell would appear as the band's bass player,
with Antonio Fargas in there too (both would have connections with Ben's
oncoming projects). After this would come Mystery Men where a gang of
inept super-heroes would attempt to prevent Geoffrey Rush's Casanova
Frankenstein from destroying Champion City. B
en would play Mr Furious, who gained
super-strength when angry, only to lose his powers when he falls for
waitress Claire Forlani. Other excellent turns were provided by Paul
Reubens as the disgusting Mr Spleen, William H. Macy as The Shoveller
and Ben's longtime compadre Janeane Garofalo as The Bowler. Indeed,
Stiller had just co-written a book with Garofalo entitled Feel This
Book: An Essential Guide To Self-Empowerment, Spiritual Supremacy And
Sexual Satisfaction. They'd also pen a piece called The Story Of Our
Sordid Love for Playboy.
In fact, Stiller search for real love was going on apace. Having finally
split from Tripplehorn, he'd dated Amanda Peet and Mystery Men co-star
Forlani. He would not have to wait long for the real thing.
Onscreen he moved on to James Toback's Black And White, a tough comedy,
often improvised, that examined race relations in America, while also
involving sex, music, bribery and murder. There would be many cameos
from the likes of Robert Downey Jr, Elijah Wood and Mike Tyson, but
Ben's crooked cop would be the central character. Providing the voice of
Robbie The Reindeer in Hooves Of Fire would be seriously light relief.
Now Ben slipped back into
the director's chair for Heat Vision And Jack. This saw Jack
Black as a brilliant ex-astronaut whose partner is a talking
motorbike, voiced by Owen
Wilson. Made for the Fox network, it was a pilot for a series that
was to spoof such programmes as Knight Rider. Sadly, Fox declined the
option and the series was never made. Disappointed, Stiller did at least
hook up with one of the show's performers, Christine Taylor.
She had broken into TV
playing Margaret Barnes in Dallas, then popped up in such comedies as
Friends, Seinfeld, Ellen and Caroline In The City, as well as playing
Marcia in both Brady Bunch movies. The couple would marry in 2000, with
daughter Ella Olivia being born two years later.
Aside from marriage, 2000 would also bring a cameo (as a cross between a
whale and a policeman!) in The Independent, a mockumentary where dad
Jerry played a producer of exploitation movies, Janeane Garofalo acting
as his daughter. Then there'd be Keeping The Faith where Jenna Elfman
came between two longtime friends, priest Ed Norton and rabbi Ben. This
was Norton's directorial debut and a pleasant romantic comedy.
More impressive was Meet The Parents which saw Ben as Gaylord Focker, a
male nurse who quite literally gets the third degree from his
girlfriend's cop dad Robert
De Niro. Interrogation, surveillance equipment and profound
suspicion all come into play as Stiller's attempts to portray himself as
ideal husband material all serve to make him look worse. Of course, De
Niro's threats to take him "down to Chinatown" do not make him
any less nervous.
Meet The Parents was a huge hit, and Ben added to his personal kudos by
returning to the MTV fold with Mission: Improbable, a short spoof that
saw him taking off Tom
Cruise, just as he had in his breakthrough short, The Hustler Of
Money back in the late Eighties. Here he would send up Cruise's
performances in Risky Business, Magnolia and Cocktail, as well as the
almost titular Mission: Impossible.
Now came another major moment in his career, when he finally brought
Derek Zoolander to the big screen. Here Zoolander, obsessed with his
looks and unable to string an intelligent sentence together, is in
bitter competition with fellow male model Owen
Wilson. He's then brainwashed and commanded to kill the prime
minister of Malaysia by fashion mogul Will Ferrell who wants to keep
child labour laws as they are. It was wacky stuff, just as it sounds,
and would once more feature the Stiller family, with the addition of
Christine Taylor, who played Zoolander's love interest. It was also a
success, despite being banned (for obvious reasons) in Malaysia, and a
bit of judicious tinkering that saw the World Trade Centre digitally
removed following the 9/11 attacks.
Having featured Owen Wilson
in one of his projects, the favour was now returned when Stiller was
cast in The Royal Tenenbaums, written by Wilson and Wes Anderson. Here
patriarch Gene Hackman attempts to sneak his way back into the family he
abandoned, a rich family containing three now-grown child prodigies. Ben
would play the wholly neurotic Chas Tenenbaum, who'd started by breeding
mice, then moved into real estate, and who hates Hackman for stealing
his money. He is not best pleased when his father returns, especially
when daddy starts showing his young children how to enjoy shoplifting
and dodging the traffic.
After appearing momentarily at the end of Jack
Black's excellent comedy Orange County, Ben moved on to Duplex, like
Reality Bites produced by Danny DeVito. This was a real oddity where Ben
and Drew Barrymore played a young yuppie couple who relocate to Brooklyn
and find themselves tortured by a free-spirited old lady neighbour with
a loud TV and a brass ensemble, eventually being driven to thoughts of
murder. This would be followed by a darker, far more arty black comedy
when he reteamed with Mike Myers and Janeane Garofalo for Nobody Knows
Anything.
This was actually quite a difficult time for Stiller. Along with Cameron
Diaz, Tim
Roth and Tobey Maguire, he was being sued by creditors of the
Cassandra Group, a money management company thats boss Dana Giachetto
had been jailed for looting the accounts of the non-famous to butter up
the stars on his books. Stiller also had to let down Danny DeVito when
he pulled out of a Broadway run of Glengarry Glen Ross to be with his
new baby. Beyond this, there were problems finding a distributor for
Envy, a movie that, despite Stiller's huge popularity, nearly went
straight to video.
2004 saw him bounce back in no uncertain style. Along Came Polly saw him
as an insurance consultant with irritable bowel syndrome and an innate
fear of risks. When his new bride Debra Messing cheats on him on their
honeymoon, though, he finds himself drawn to the liberated but flaky Jennifer
Aniston, a relationship that forces him to take a much-needed walk
on the wild side. The movie was a big hit, knocking The Return Of The
King from Number One, which more than made up for Stiller's being bitten
on the chin by a ferret during filming, his pain being compounded by the
root canal work he'd had done the day before. Ouch, that's gotta sting.
He followed up this success with another in Starsky And Hutch, which
teamed him for the sixth time with Owen Wilson. Here Stiller re-imagined
Seventies hero David Starsky as a strict copper obsessed with his Gran
Torino car, Wilson playing Hutch as laid-back and deeply irresponsible.
Together they pursued Vince
Vaughn, a crook who's developed a brand of cocaine that cannot be
tracked by dogs. After this international hit came the long-awaited
release of Envy. Directed by Barry Levinson, this saw Ben's happy life
decimated by jealousy when buddy, neighbour and workmate Jack
Black makes a fortune from a device that evaporates pet-poo, an
invention in which Stiller refused to invest.
There'd be more craziness,
and more Vince
Vaughn in Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story where a gang of misfits
enter a Las Vegas dodgeball tournament in order to save their local gym
from being taken over by a health and fitness chain. Then Stiller, along
with Vaughn and Jack
Black, would contribute a cameo to buddy Will Ferrell's Anchorman,
where Ferrell played a Seventies newscaster at war with fellow presenter
Christina Applegate. And then would come the much-anticipated Meet The
Fockers, a sequel to Meet The Parents where De Niro and wife Blythe
Danner would visit Ben's parents, played by Dustin
Hoffman and, in a very rare appearance, Barbra Streisand.
Meet The Fockers would be a sure-fire hit, Stiller's fourth successful
lead role inside a year. He could now do pretty much as he pleased. More
comedy will surely follow, but don't be surprised if he suddenly foists
updates of Crime And Punishment or the Naked Lunch upon us. He is a
brilliant clown but, as said, a really, really, really dark guy. ~Dominic
Wills
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