Paul Reiser (born March 30, 1957) is an American stand-up comedian, actor, author and screenwriter.
Reiser was born in New York City, the son of Helen, a homemaker, and Sam Reiser, a wholesale health food distributor. Reiser attended the East Side Hebrew Institute on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and graduated from Stuyvesant High School in New York City. He earned his bachelor’s degree at Binghamton University, where he majored in music (piano, composition). He was active in campus theater productions and founded “The Little Theater That Could”, an on-campus community theater organization located in Hinman College, Reiser’s dorm community. It was later renamed Hinman Production Company.[Reiser eventually found his calling when he performed in New York City comedy clubs during university summer breaks.
After honing his skills as a stand-up comic in New York City, Reiser’s break-out film role came in 1982 when he appeared in Diner, a coming-of-age film by Barry Levinson. Reiser’s character, Modell, a closet stand-up comedian, effectively brought Reiser’s comic abilities to the attention of Hollywood. The film also helped boost the careers of his co-stars Kevin Bacon, Steve Guttenberg, and Mickey Rourke. He followed this success playing a detective in 1984’s Beverly Hills Cop, a role he reprised in the 1987 sequel, Beverly Hills Cop II. Reiser also had roles in James Cameron’s 1986 movie Aliens, in The Marrying Man (1991), and in the comedy Bye Bye, Love (1995).
Reiser starred for two years on television as one of two possible fathers of a teenage girl in the sitcom My Two Dads, and later rose to fame in North America as Paul Buchman on Mad About You, a long-running comedy series he helped create in which Helen Hunt co-starred as his wife. For his work in Mad About You, Reiser received nominations for an Emmy, a Golden Globe, an American Comedy Award, and a Screen Actors Guild award. In the successful show’s final 1999 season, he and Hunt were paid US $1 million ($1.3 million in current dollar terms) per episode.[4] In 2001, Reiser took on a dramatic role as a man desperate to find his birth mother after learning he has a serious illness in the British television movie My Beautiful Son.
Reiser has also written two books: Couplehood, about the ups and downs of being in a committed relationship, and Babyhood, about his experiences as a first-time father. Couplehood was unique in the fact it started on page 145. Reiser explained this as his way of giving the reader a false sense of accomplishment. Both books appeared on The New York Times bestseller list. In May 1996, Reiser appeared on The Late Show with David Letterman in the middle of writing his second book. Since he didn’t have a title yet (it would later be called Babyhood), he showed a prop book with the same cover as his first book Couplehood. The title was simply called Book, a name Whoopi Goldberg used for her 1997 publication.
In 2002, Reiser made a guest appearance as himself on Larry David’s critically-acclaimed HBO sitcom, Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Reiser placed number 77 on Comedy Central’s list of the 100 Greatest Stand-ups of All Time.
The name of Reiser’s production company – Nuance Productions – comes from one of his lines in the film, “Diner,” explaining his discomfort with the word nuance.
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Source: Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Reiser
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