Billy Crystal

William Edward Crystal was born on March 14, 1948, at Doctors Hospital on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and raised initially in the Bronx before his family relocated to Long Beach, New York, on Long Island. His father, Jack Crystal, owned and operated the Commodore Music Store, founded by Crystal's grandfather Julius Gabler, and also worked as a jazz promoter, producer, and executive for Commodore Records, a label founded by Crystal's uncle, musician and songwriter Milt Gabler. Crystal's mother was Helen, née Gabler. He grew up alongside two older brothers, Joel and Richard, known as Rip. Jazz musicians including Arvell Shaw, Pee Wee Russell, Eddie Condon, and Billie Holiday were frequent visitors to the family home. Crystal is Jewish, with ancestral roots in Austria, Russia, and Lithuania, and he had his bar mitzvah at Temple Emanu-El in Long Beach. In 1963, following the decline of Dixieland jazz and the rise of discount record stores, his father lost his business and died that same year at age 54 after a heart attack. Crystal's mother died in 2001.

After graduating from Long Beach High School in 1965, Crystal attended Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, on a baseball scholarship, though the baseball program was suspended during his first year and he never played. He left Marshall and returned to New York, studying acting at HB Studio and enrolling at Nassau Community College before transferring to New York University, where he majored in film and television directing. He earned a BFA from NYU's School of Fine Arts in 1970. Among his instructors was Martin Scorsese, and his classmates included Oliver Stone and Christopher Guest.

Crystal began his professional career in 1969 by joining improv troupes, spending more than four years performing with a comedy group at colleges and coffee houses while working as a substitute teacher on Long Island. He later became a solo act, performing regularly at The Improv and Catch a Rising Star. In 1976, he appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and on an episode of All in the Family. That same year he appeared on the dais at the Dean Martin celebrity roast of Muhammad Ali, performing impressions of both Ali and sportscaster Howard Cosell, which began a lifelong friendship between Crystal and Ali. Although Crystal was scheduled to appear on the first episode of NBC Saturday Night on October 11, 1975, his sketch was cut; he did perform in episode 17 of that first season. His earliest prominent television role came as Jodie Dallas on the ABC sitcom Soap, one of the first unambiguously gay characters in an American television series, a role he held throughout the show's entire run from 1977 to 1981.

In 1982, Crystal hosted his own NBC variety program, The Billy Crystal Comedy Hour, which was canceled after two episodes aired. After guest-hosting Saturday Night Live twice in 1984, he joined the regular cast for the 1984–85 season. His recurring parody of Fernando Lamas, a smarmy talk-show host whose catchphrase "You look... mahvelous!" became a cultural phenomenon, led to a 1985 stand-up album titled Mahvelous! The title track, co-written with Paul Shaffer, peaked at number 58 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States and number 17 in Canada, and the album received a Grammy Award nomination for Best Comedy Recording at the 1986 Grammy Awards.

Crystal's film career gained momentum with the action comedy Running Scared in 1986, in which he starred opposite Gregory Hines. Subsequent film roles included Throw Momma from the Train (1987), The Princess Bride (1987), When Harry Met Sally... (1989), City Slickers (1991), Forget Paris (1995), Father's Day (1997), Analyze This (1999), Analyze That (2002), and Parental Guidance (2012). He also provided the voice of Mike Wazowski in Pixar's Monsters, Inc. franchise. Crystal hosted the Academy Awards nine times, beginning in 1990 and most recently in 2012. His first film appearance had come earlier, in Joan Rivers's 1978 film Rabbit Test, and he appeared briefly in This Is Spinal Tap (1984) as Morty the Mime.

Crystal made his Broadway debut in 2004 with the one-man show 700 Sundays, for which he won the Tony Award for Best Special Theatrical Event and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Solo Performance in 2005. He returned to the production in 2014, and that version was filmed by HBO and received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Variety Special. In 2022, Crystal wrote and starred in the Broadway musical Mr. Saturday Night, based on his film of the same name, earning Tony nominations for Best Actor in a Musical and Best Book of a Musical.

Beyond stage and screen, Crystal has written five books, including his 2013 memoir Still Foolin' 'Em. His accolades span multiple disciplines, encompassing six Primetime Emmy Awards, a Tony Award, nominations for three Grammy Awards and three Golden Globe Awards, and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, which he received in 1991. He was awarded the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in 2007, the Critics' Choice Lifetime Achievement Award in 2022, and the Kennedy Center Honors in 2023. Crystal was born in New York, New York.