Ben Stiller

Ben Stiller (born November 30, 1965, New York City, New York, U.S.) is an American actor, writer, and director, one of the leading movie stars of the early 21st century, known for his comic portrayal of neurotic or aggrieved characters.

Stiller was the son of Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, who for many years were a celebrated comedy team. While growing up, he occasionally appeared on television with his parents and made his own amateur Super-8 films, which often parodied blockbusters of the time. In 1983 Stiller enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles, but dropped out less than a year later. After working as an intern at the Actors Studio in New York City, he landed a role in the Broadway premiere (1986) of John Guare’s The House of Blue Leaves and subsequently reprised it when the play was adapted for television (1987). Bit parts in films followed, as well as a brief stint (1989) as a writer and performer on the sketch-comedy series Saturday Night Live.

In 1990 Stiller debuted his own sketch series, The Ben Stiller Show, on MTV. Although the show was canceled within months, a revived version aired on the Fox network in 1992–93. Featuring a young ensemble cast, The Ben Stiller Show lampooned popular culture in an anarchically spirited fashion, and its writing staff (which, besides Stiller, included Judd Apatow and Bob Odenkirk, among others) earned an Emmy Award. After the show was again canceled, Stiller directed and acted in the dramedy Reality Bites (1994), a portrait of disaffected, media-saturated young adults that was considered a defining representation of Generation X. He stepped behind the camera again for The Cable Guy (1996), a dark comedy starring Jim Carrey, but the film was poorly received.

Britannica Quiz

Pop Culture Quiz

Stiller won praise for his lead role in the art-house picaresque Flirting with Disaster (1996), but it was his performance as a lovelorn nebbish in the gleefully vulgar (and wildly popular) comedy There’s Something About Mary (1998) that made him a big-screen star. After demonstrating his versatility with such roles as a heroin-addicted screenwriter in the drama Permanent Midnight (1998), Stiller elicited laughs in Meet the Parents (2000) as a man whose awkward attempts to impress his prospective father-in-law (played by Robert De Niro) invariably go awry. The film was a box-office hit and led to equally farcical sequels in 2004 and 2010. Stiller next starred as a dim-witted fashion model in the madcap Zoolander (2001), which he also cowrote and directed, before joining the ensemble of Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums (2001).

Stiller found continued commercial success, if not critical acclaim, with a string of films in 2004, including the romantic comedy Along Came Polly, the sports-movie spoof Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, and the cop-show adaptation Starsky & Hutch—one of several films in his career in which his tightly wound persona provided an amusing foil for the easygoing charm of costar Owen Wilson. Two years later Stiller starred in the highly popular family-oriented adventure Night at the Museum, in which museum displays magically come to life. Sequels followed in 2009 and 2014. He also provided the voice of a wisecracking lion in the animated Madagascar series (2005, 2008, 2012).

In Tropic Thunder (2008), his next project as actor, screenwriter, and director, Stiller depicted the comically disastrous production of a Hollywood film about the Vietnam War. As a satire of the entertainment industry, the movie echoed themes that ran through Zoolander and some of his television work. Stiller sensitively personified an aging misanthrope in the relationship-focused Greenberg (2010) before returning to big-budget fare with the caper Tower Heist (2011) and the sci-fi farce The Watch (2012). In 2013 he directed and starred in the melancholy and fantastical The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, which was adapted from a short story by James Thurber. The film chronicles the reveries and real-life encounters of a floundering photograph editor. Stiller then evoked the angst of a stultified documentary filmmaker in Noah Baumbach’s dark comedy While We’re Young (2014).

In 2016 Stiller reprised his Zoolander role in a sequel, which he also directed and cowrote. The next year he appeared in Brad’s Status, playing a father who begins to question his life choices when he takes his son on a tour of prospective colleges, and as an estranged son of a sculptor (Dustin Hoffman) in The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected). Stiller then took a gritty turn by directing Escape at Dannemora (2018), a miniseries about the 2015 jailbreak of two convicted murderers from a maximum-security prison and the manhunt that followed. He later made cameo appearances in Hubie Halloween (2020) and Locked Down (2021). Stiller subsequently returned to TV, directing episodes of the sci-fi TV series Severance (2022– ), in which employees can undergo a procedure that separates their home and work lives.

Get Unlimited Access

Try Britannica Premium for free and discover more.

Subscribe