Ben Stiller - Biography

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 recognised 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 travelling 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.

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.

For his education, young Ben would attend the Cathedral School of St John the Divine at Morningside Heights in New York City. A co-ed Episcopal school, this was actually set on the cathedral premises on Amsterdam Avenue.  From here he'd move on to Calhoun School, an independent co-ed on the Upper West Side that took pupils from pre-school upwards. One alumna was Peggy Guggenheim. From the age of 12, Stiller had also worked with the Meri Mini Players, a repertory group for spirited kids of 6 to 13. This group had been formed in 1969 by Meridee Stein as the Mary Poppins Mini Players (it would, in 1983, become the First All Children's Theatre) and, come 1975, their auditions, rehearsals and plays would take place in the basement of Hotel Opera, on Broadway at 76th Street. In one production, named Clever Jack, Stiller would play a giant. One of his peers and friends was Anthony Barrile who, in 1987 would appear in Hamburger Hill and would later enjoy a bit hit on Broadway with The Who's Tommy. Keen on most aspects of entertainment, Stiller would also spend a couple of years in the No Wave electro band Capital Punishment, a three-piece featuring Peter Zusi and Kristian Roebling, with Stiller on drums and backing vocals. The band would play at Stiller's bar mitzvah, where they'd perform a cover of Hey Jude. Ordinarily they were much tougher than that, their only album being titled Roadkill and containing tracks like the reprised Necronomicon and Creature Of The Dark (Night).

Graduating from Calhoun in 1983, and clearly both ambitious and up for a challenge, Stiller would straight away find work on New York's cabaret circuit, appearing as a support act for the famed Chinese-American dancer, comedienne and all-round diva Jadin Wong. Though by now in her seventies, Wong was still much in demand, as a performer and as an agent and casting director. Stiller could learn a lot here - one of Wong's earlier support acts had been Barbra Streisand. He'd pick up even more experience when working as an intern for Alan Thicke on a new late night talk show, Thicke Of The Night. Thicke was a well-known Canadian actor and songwriter being used to front a new rival to The Tonight Show. It launched on September 5th, 1983, with a huge publicity campaign but critics weren't keen on the mix of comedy and chat and it lasted just one season. Thicke would soon find stardom elsewhere, in the hit show Growing Pains which would give an early role to a young Leonardo DiCaprio.

With so many irons in the fire, Stiller was confused as to which path to take. He could be a musician, a cabaret entertainer, a film actor/director/producer. Choosing a direction, he enrolled on a film course at UCLA but 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 nine months. He dropped out and returned to New York, mooching off his parents, seeking an agent and earning pennies as a bus boy and waiter at Cafe Central on Columbus Avenue near 79th Street. Having opened some five years earlier, four blocks away in a far seedier neighbourhood, Cafe Central had been a cool one-room joint popular with renowned off-Broadway performers like Peter Weller and John Heard. As its rep grew, so it came to be patronised by the likes of Pacino, De Niro and Walken. In 1984 it would undergo a $1 million move and refurb, now being all exposed brick, Italian marble and Honduras mahogany. Now exclusive rather than cool, it remained an actors' hang-out, meaning Stiller would be serving the likes of Debra Winger, Elizabeth McGovern, Matt Dillon, Harrison Ford, Penny Marshall and Bette Midler. Sadly, despite his smiles and eavesdropping, Stiller would make no useful connections and would be forced to earn his fame the hard way.

Instead, he'd look for work and continue his training at the famous Actors Studio, an institution suited to his precocious talent and angry temperament. Here he'd be schooled not just in thespian technique but also stage management.

As said, one of Stiller's friends, Anthony Barrile, would score a part in Hamburger Hill, one of a spate of Vietnam movies released in the mid-Eighties. Indeed, many of Stiller's friends and acquaintances would find work there. Stiller himself, though, did not strike so lucky. He'd audition for Oliver Stone's Platoon, even meet Stone himself, but was never cast. His path to the top would be far more complex. One part he did score, thanks to his mother’s theatre connections , was in a Tony-winning 1986 revival of John Guare’s The House Of Blue Leaves. This was a black comedy first staged back in 1966, concerning nuns, explosives, the Vietnam draft and a visit by Pope Paul VI to New York City. It had first opened off-Broadway in 1971 when it had starred Katherine Helmond, William Atherton and Stiller's mother and had won an Obie as Best American Play. In this latest revival, again off-Broadway at the Mitzi E Newhouse Theatre at the Lincoln Centre, John Mahoney would play zookeeper Artie Shaughnessy who wants to reinvent himself as a film soundtrack artist and plans to dumps his wife Swoosie Kurtz in the mental home of the title and take off west with lover Stockard Channing. His son, Ronnie, played by Stiller, is a mentally disturbed soldier who's run away from Fort Dix and is secretly hiding out in his old bedroom at home. Desperate to be someone, Stiller sadly recounts how he once auditioned for his dad's Hollywood director friend for the lead in Huckleberry Finn but, pulling some stunts he'd learned from the Ed Sullivan Show, he'd succeeded only in convincing the director he was insane. Now he hopes to find fame by blowing up the Pope with a home-made bomb, but manages only to kill the director's girlfriend and two nuns. Most of the characters see success in terms of fame, and most of them are relying on the director, played, in a weird late cameo, by Christopher Walken who spends ten minutes sitting staring at the audience (Walken had recently appeared onstage in Hurlyburly with Stiller's father Jerry).

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 his onstage father Mahoney, soon to find major TV stardom as the longsuffering  dad of Niles and Frasier Crane. 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, with Mahoney as Paul Newman’s Fast Eddie Felson and Stiller adding extra ditziness to Tom Cruise’s already manic Vince, playing him as a ten-pin bowler, a cocksure poseur who struts, gurns and constantly snogs his girlfriend, here played by Stockard Channing.  They'd also be joined by Kurtz, Channing, Aiello and Hegarty.

The short 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, joining such regulars as Dana Carvey, Phil Hartman and Jon Lovitz (Mike Myers would, like Stiller, be a bit-part player). 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, staged once more for the cameras at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre, shot with mini-cams and featuring Swoosie Kurtz, John Mahoney, Stiller and Christine Baranski. 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 series of comedy sketches where Stiller would play a series of film and TV characters like William Shatner, Al Pacino, Bono, and especially and most often, Tom Cruise, satirising much of Cruise's work beyond The Colour Of Money. He and Kahn would indulge in flights of fancy like The Eddie Munster Comeback Special, and they'd play off one another in a fake battle of egos. Stiller's parents and sister Amy would guest, as would Garry Shandling and Sarah Jessica Parker. 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 had much to do with Judd Apatow, a former stand-up comic who'd worked at LA's The Improv, roomed with Adam Sandler and written gags for Jim Carrey, going on to become a writer and powerful producer. Apatow had met Stiller back in 1990 outside an Elvis Costello show and they'd become friends. It would be a very fruitful friendship, with Apatow introducing Stiller to many of the members of what be known as The Frat Pack. The second Ben Stiller Show 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, as well as Ben’s early TV heroes, like David Cassidy and Adam West.

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$h 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.

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.

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 writer who moves to LA to avoid New York's druggy lifestyle. Staying with buddy Owen Wilson and beginning a relationship with Brit TV exec Elizabeth Hurley, he's upset when he can only find work writing for a puppet show and his mother dies horribly; soon he's drawn into heroin use by mysterious German pick-up Connie Nielsen. He has a baby with Hurley but descends ever further into addiction, living half the time with a Latin dealer-woman who lets him jack up in the house. 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. He was smart, witty, sweaty, manic and zonked, shooting up beside his child and , in one memorable scene, taking crack with a fellow denizen of rehab and hurling himself against the windows of an empty high-rise office block. 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.

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. Ben 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, as would be an appearance on Sesame Street where he'd sing The People In Your Neighbourhood with Telly Monster.

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.

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.

In 2002 Stiller would be due to return to the stage in Glengarry Glen Ross, written by David Mamet and set to star Danny DeVito, but would pull out when his daughter was born, feeling an eight-month separation from his new family would be too much. Instead he's appear momentarily at the end of Jack Black’s excellent comedy Orange County, then moved on to Duplex, like Reality Bites produced by his recent almost-co-star 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.

Stiller would now appear in several episodes of Larry David's comedy of embarrassment, Curb Your Enthusiasm, in an ongoing sequence where Mel Brooks considers casting David alongside Stiller in The Producers. When David accidentally stabs Stiller in the eye at a birthday party he must battle to persuade Stiller not to drop the project. Stiller would follow this up with Starsky And Hutch, which teamed him for the sixth time with Owen Wilson. Here Stiller re-imagined Seventies hero David Starsky as a strict, uptight and manic policeman, obsessed with his own mother, a top cop for over twenty years, and 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.

There’d be more craziness, and more Vince Vaughn in Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story where a gym owner Vaughn would be told by his banker (played by Stiller's wife Christine) that he has thirty days to pay his debts or he'll be bought up by rival Stiller and his beloved gym turned into a parking lot. So Vaughn drags together a misfit dodgeball teamed, coached by a wheelchair-bound Rip Torn, and enters the World Series in Vegas, taking on Stiller's team of giant bodybuilders. Stiller, overacting wildly with a huge moustache and an inflatable in his crotch, would lead the mayhem, and score another $100 million hit. 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. Stiller would appear in an anarchic scene where several news teams fight to the death. Ferrell would lead a Channel 4 team including Steve Carell and Paul Rudd: a bullying, crowing Vince Vaughn would lead the Evening News, with Luke Wilson heading Channel 2 and a pipe-smoking, psychotic Tim Robbins would bring his Public News guys. Stiller, again with comic moustache, would pile in with the Spanish Language News, beginning the conflict with a gloating "Tonight's top story - the sewers run red with Burgundy's blood" and ending it with a panicked squawk of "Policia!" An utterly classic sequence. Next 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 tree-hugging, sexually open parents, played by Dustin Hoffman and, in a very rare appearance, Barbra Streisand, who'd warmed up audiences for Jadin Wong all those years ago. Where Meet The Parents had taken over $300 million worldwide, Meet The Fockers would break $500 million, utterly out of the ordinary for comedy films.

After popping up in Sledge: The Untold Story, a mockumentary examining the rise and fall of an action star, a dancer who broke through in the movie Bloodfight 2, Stiller would lend his voice to Madagascar.

Next he'd join Jason Bateman, who'd recently appeared in Dodgeball and Starsky And Hutch, in the TV comedy series Arrested Development, where Bateman would attempt to run a painfully dysfunctional family. Over three episodes Stiller would pay a stage magician who mentors Will Arnett and Tony Hale. After this he'd join his old Ben Stiller Show cohort Andy Dick, as well as Jack Black, in Danny Roane: First Time Director, a film mirroring Dick's own career in that it concerned a comedian who's blown his career via addiction and now tries to regain control by writing and directing his own project. Stiller would appear in a five minute scene where Dick tries to call in a favour from his deeply suspicious friend.

Stiller's second project of 2006 would be a remake of the 1959 classic School For Scoundrels. Directed by Todd Phillips, who'd helmed both Starsky and Hutch and the original Frat Pack movie Old School, this would see Jon Heder as a parking meter cop, bullied and ridiculed by all, who goes to Billy Bob Thornton's confidence-boosting classes in order to build up the courage to ask out cute neighbour Jacinda Barrett. Complications arise when Thornton decides he wants Barrett for himself, Heder seeking a way to defeat his master by tracking down former star pupil Stiller, now scruffy, long-haired and completely blown away. There'd be another cameo in his pal Jack Black's Tenacious D In The Pick Of Destiny where wannabe rockers Black and Kyle Gass would notice that many of the great guitarists seem to use the same pick. Going to a music shop they're taken out back by assistant Stiller, super-grungey with long hair and glasses, tats and sideboards, who tells them the drawn out and extremely silly story of the pick's supranatural qualities and wild history.

Stiller's final release of 2006 would be the big one. This was Night At the Museum where Stiller would play a lazy dreamer, divorced and losing the respect of his young son. He's then forced to seek the hero within when, taking a job as nightwatchman at the museum of natural history, he finds the exhibits coming to life, including Attila the Hun, Teddy Roosevelt, tiny Romans and cowboys, and dinosaurs. Boasting some brilliant special effects, the film would take close to $600 million worldwide - far, far more than Stiller's next flick, a reunion with the Farrelly Brothers that saw them remake Neil Simon's 1972 classic The Heartbreak Kid. Here Stiller would take the Charles Grodin role, marrying Malin Akerman then falling immediately for Michelle Monaghan, the girl of his dreams. All subtleties would be crushed under the Farrellys usual gross-outs. Also featuring would be Stiller's father.

Having appeared in a Sesame Street Christmas Special, Stiller would now return to directing for the first time since Zoolander. The vehicle would be Tropic Thunder, an action comedy where he'd play Tugg Speedman, a former dancer who finds success as a baby-saving, machine-gun-toting hero in the Scorcher franchise (not unlike the hero in Sledge: the Untold Story), who's mocked for an attempt at serious drama and now finds himself in the movie of the title, a Vietnam epic, directed by Night At The Museum co-star Steve Coogan and featuring Robert Downey Jr as an Australian super-thespian, a five-times Oscar winner who has his skin dyed to play a black officer. Also in the team are Brandon T Jackson, a real black actor, young Jay Baruchel and Jack Black, playing a comedian who deals exclusively in fart jokes. A severely pressurised Coogan decides to cut costs and save time by taking his leads out into the jungle to shoot guerrilla-style, but they caught up with genuine drug-runners and Stiller is captured, tortured and held to ransom, before it's discovered that he's the star of the only video the bandits possess, Simple Jack, and he's forced to dress up and play the movie's retarded lead over and over. Stiller would be excellent in the part, initially sensitive and desperate to win respect, then macho as he leads the lost troupe and finally pathetic as he acts out his greatest humiliation, daubed in thick make-up and thrashed with a stick by the boy-leader of the gang, a semi-comic version of Christopher Walken in The Deer Hunter. The film would also draw fine performances from Stiller's friend and past victim Tom Cruise as a foul-mouthed producer, and Downey who'd actually be Oscar-nominated for his efforts - very rare for the star of a comedy.

2009 would begin with Battle Of The Smithsonian, a sequel to Night At The Museum, where Stiller, aided by Amy Adams' Amelia Earhart would attempt to rescue his ancient and miniature buddies when they're threatened with years in storage. This time he must battle an Egyptian ruler out to raise an army of the dead and take over the world. Again the effects would be extraordinary, with even artwork now coming to life, but the film would not reap huge profits due to its $150 million budget. Very different would be The Marc Pease Experience, directed by Todd Louiso, who'd earlier appeared in School For Scoundrels. Here Jason Schwartzman has ruined a High School production of The Wiz by freaking out and running offstage. Eight years later he's hoping to find fame with a singing group and sells his condo to finance a demo to be produced, he believes, by his former drama teacher, Stiller. Unfortunately, Stiller has never forgiven Schwartzman for wrecking his show and, beyond this, is keen to seduce Anna Kendrick, also Schwartzman's target. Matters build to a head as Stiller stages The Wiz yet again. The movie would receive a very limited release in August, 2009. Odd, considering the weight of its stars.

Stiller would end 2009 with a Madagascar Christmas special, then move on to Greenberg, directed by Noah Baumbach, an occasional writer for Stiller's past colleague Wes Anderson, and written and produced by Jennifer Jason Leigh. Here Stiller would play an impossible narcissist, angry at himself and the world, who comes to house-sit his brother's pad in LA. Here he forms a relationship with his brother's assistant Greta Gerwig and tries to reunite with Rhys Ifans, a former member of the band Stiller abandoned and wrecked on the cusp of success.  There's also Leigh, Stiller's former love, who's now moved on. Repressed and self-obsessed, Stiller hurts everyone he meets yet still we somehow care what happens to him - another fine performance from Stiller.

Following this, Stiller would join the Emmy-nominated animation Phineas And Ferb for one episode, playing a super-villain attempting to ruin the heroes' crusade for the "best day ever". Nothing goes right for him, however, as he's scolded and attacked by his wife (voiced by Christine Taylor) and mocked for his name, Khaka Peu Peu, which he claims means Strong Fist. He'd end the year with a return to the high-grossing Fockers franchise with Little Fockers, where he and Teri Polo would have to cope with new twin arrivals. His former teacher, Jadin Wong, would be credited as casting associate, her final major credit as she died in 2010.

Little Fockers would be a sure-fire hit, Stiller’s latest in an increasingly long line. As the highest-grossing comedian in the world, 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