Tommy Wiseau is a Actor, Director, Writer and Producer American born on 3 october 1955
If you like this person, let us know!
Nationality USABirth 3 october 1955 (69 years)
Tommy Wiseau (/wɪˈzoʊ/) is a director, screenwriter, producer, and actor. He is best known for The Room (2003), which has been described by many critics as "one of the worst movies ever made" and has gained cult film status. He also directed the 2004 documentary Homeless in America and the 2015 sitcom The Neighbors.
Biography
Wiseau is secretive about his early life. In various interviews he has claimed to have lived in France "a long time ago", asserted that he grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana, US, and described having "an entire family" in Chalmette, Louisiana. In interviews following the release of The Room in 2003, Wiseau gave an age indicating that he was born in 1968 or 1969. Actor Greg Sestero claims in his 2013 memoir The Disaster Artist that his brother's girlfriend obtained copies of Wiseau's US immigration papers and found that Wiseau was born "much earlier" than he claimed, in an Eastern Bloc country in the 1950s.
In The Disaster Artist, Sestero asserts that Wiseau intimated to him—admittedly through "fantastical, sad, self-contradictory stories"—that he grew up somewhere in communist Eastern Europe, and as a young adult moved to Strasbourg, France, where he adopted the name Pierre and worked as a restaurant dishwasher. According to Sestero, Wiseau described being wrongfully arrested following a drug raid at a youth hostel, and being traumatised by his treatment by the French police—an experience that led him to arrange passage to America to live with his aunt and uncle in Chalmette, Louisiana. Wiseau subsequently moved to San Francisco, California, where he worked as a street vendor selling toys to tourists near Fisherman's Wharf.
Sestero asserts that Wiseau had the nickname "The Birdman" for his unique bird toys, which were only popular in Europe at the time; this led him to legally change his name to Thomas Pierre Wiseau, "taking the French word for bird, oiseau, and swapping out the O for the W of his birth name". According to Sestero, Wiseau worked a variety of jobs in the San Francisco Bay Area, including restaurant busboy and hospital worker, and ran a business called Street Fashions USA that sold irregular blue jeans at discounted prices. Wiseau eventually purchased and rented out large retail spaces in and around San Francisco and Los Angeles, making him independently wealthy. In the same book, however, Sestero admits that the idea of Wiseau becoming wealthy so quickly via the jobs Wiseau claims to have had is so unlikely that he himself finds it impossible to believe. Sestero never makes his own beliefs clear, but does on several occasions suggest that many people involved with the creation of The Room earnestly believed the film to be part of some money-laundering scheme for organized crime.
Sestero recounts that at some point in late adulthood, Wiseau was involved in a near-fatal car crash in California after another driver ran a red light and struck Wiseau's vehicle; as a result, Wiseau was hospitalized for several weeks. Sestero suggests that this incident was the turning point in Wiseau's life that led him to pursue his dreams of becoming an actor and director, ambitions that he had long neglected while pursuing financial security. Wiseau's cinematic influences include James Dean, Marlon Brando, Tennessee Williams, Orson Welles, Elizabeth Taylor, and Alfred Hitchcock.
Best films
(1972)
(Director) Usually with