BRAD PITT

A critic once wrote that Brad Pitt combined "the matinee idol looks of Gary Cooper with the sex symbol loveliness of Marilyn Monroe”. This is the line which sums up Pitt’s appeal.
He was born on December 18, 1963, in Shawnee, Oklahoma. Pitt grew up in Springfield (Missouri). He is the eldest of three children in a devoutly Southern Baptist family. His father, Bill Pitt, had a trucking company and his mother, Jane Pitt, was a High school counselor. But he was deeply influenced by his father. "Where I grew up," he once said "you deal. You get through it, power through it, straight up the middle. And you don't complain". It's an attitude that's served him well as he's battled the improbable pressures of stardom. He was raised, alongside brother Doug and sister Julie. Pitt originally wanted to be an advertising art director. That is why he studied journalism at the University of Missouri. However, the young college student had other quiet aspirations, the product of a childhood love of movies, which finally seemed tangible his last semester at university when he realized, "I can leave." On a whim, Pitt dropped out of college, packed up his Datsun, and headed West to pursue an acting career in Los Angeles, just two credits shy of a college degree.

Pitt told his parents he intended to enroll in the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. He joined an acting class and, shortly after, accompanied a classmate as her scene partner on an audition with an agent. In a twist of fate, the agent signed Pitt instead of his classmate. After weathering only seven months in Los Angeles, Pitt had secured an agent and regular acting work.

Pitt made his big screen debut in 1989's horror film Cutting Class with Donovan Leitch, and played a teen track star in Sandy Tung's Across the Tracks, but it was a well-timed bit part in a controversial Hollywood film that pushed him into the glare of instant stardom. Pitt's performance as a renegade, sugar-tongued hitchhiker who gets picked up by the two title characters in Ridley Scott's Thelma and Louise (1991) grabbed universal attention despite only a few minutes worth of screen time.