Actors - Quentin Tarantino

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	Actors - Quentin Tarantino

Quentin Jerome Tarantino (born March 27, 1963) is an American film director, actor, and Oscar-winning screenwriter who rapidly rose to fame in the early 1990s as a stylish auteur whose bold use of nonlinear storylines, memorable dialogue, and bloody violence brought new life to familiar American film archetypes.

He is the most famous of the young directors behind the independent film revolution of the 1990s, well-known for his public persona as a motor-mouthed, geeky hipster with an encyclopedic knowledge of both popular and art-house cinema.

Early life

Tarantino was born in Knoxville, Tennessee to Tony Tarantino, an actor and musician of Italian descent, and Connie McHugh who was of half-Irish and half-Cherokee Indian extraction. Shortly after Quentin's birth, his mother married to musician Curt Zastoupil, a person with whom Quentin would form a strong bond.

He started kindergarten in the San Gabriel Valley in 1968. In 1971, the family moved to El Segundo, in the South Bay area of Los Angeles, where Tarantino attended Hawthorne Christian School. Dropping out of Narbonne High School in Harbor City, California at the age of sixteen, he went on to learn acting at the James Best Theatre Company.

At the age of 22, he wrote his first script, Captain Peachfuzz and the Anchovy Bandit. In 1984, Tarantino started working at the Video Archives, a noted Manhattan Beach video store; there he befriended Roger Avary, a fellow employee with whom he would later collaborate. He continued to study acting at Allen Garfield's Actors' Shelter in Beverly Hills, but began to concentrate mainly on scriptwriting.

Career history

While employed as a video store clerk, Tarantino penned the script for Natural Born Killers
. He sold the script to a movie make-up company for $1,500 and the promise to do the make-up on a future film that would turn out to be Reservoir Dogs
. His first major break came with the sale of another script called True Romance
, written with Avary. It was made into a film starring Patricia Arquette and Christian Slater. He wrote the original screenplay for Natural Born Killers as part of the longer screenplay that True Romance came from. It should be acknowledged that it was changed significantly by subsequent writers (including Oliver Stone), so much so that he declined a Screenwriting credit in lieu of a Story credit.

The sale of True Romance (eventually released in 1993) garnered him attention. He met Lawrence Bender at a Hollywood party and Bender encouraged Tarantino to go write a film. The end product was Reservoir Dogs (1992), a stylish, witty, and blood-soaked heist movie that set the tone for his later films. The script was read by director Monte Hellman who helped secure funding from Live Entertainment and also Tarantino's directorship of the film. Harvey Keitel heard of the script through his wife, who attended a class with Lawrence Bender (see Reservoir Dogs special edition DVD commentary for the full story). He read the script and also contributed to funding, took an Executive Producer role, and a lead in the movie.

Following the success of Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino was approached by Hollywood and offered numerous projects, including Speed
and Men in Black
. He instead retreated to Amsterdam to work on his script for Pulp Fiction
. When finally released, the film won the Palme d'Or (Golden Palm) at the 1994 Cannes film festival and, along with Steven Soderbergh's Palme d'Or winner Sex, Lies, and Videotape
, revolutionised the independent film industry. It was a complexly plotted film with a similarly brutal wit. It featured many critically acclaimed performances, and was noted for reviving the career of John Travolta. Pulp Fiction also earned Tarantino and Avery Oscars for Best Original Screenplay, and it was also nominated for Best Picture.

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Actors - Quentin Tarantino

Early life

Career history

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