Quentin Tarantino

Quentin Jerome Tarantino was born on March 27, 1963, in Knoxville, Tennessee, the only child of Connie McHugh and Tony Tarantino, an aspiring actor who left the family before his son's birth. His mother was of Cherokee and Irish descent, while his father was Italian-American. After a brief marriage and divorce, his mother returned to Knoxville before relocating to Los Angeles with Tarantino in 1966. She subsequently married musician Curtis Zastoupil, and the family settled in Torrance, California. Zastoupil took Tarantino to numerous film screenings, and his mother permitted him to watch mature films including Carnal Knowledge (1971) and Deliverance (1972). Following his mother's divorce from Zastoupil in 1973 and a misdiagnosis of Hodgkin's lymphoma, Tarantino lived briefly with his grandparents in Knoxville before returning to Torrance.

At fourteen, Tarantino wrote an early screenplay, Captain Peachfuzz and the Anchovy Bandit, based on the 1977 film Smokey and the Bandit. The following year, he was grounded for shoplifting Elmore Leonard's novel The Switch from a Kmart, though he was permitted to attend the Torrance Community Theater, where he appeared in productions including Two Plus Two Makes Sex and Romeo and Juliet. He dropped out of Narbonne High School in Harbor City that same year.

During the 1980s, Tarantino held a variety of jobs, including working as an usher at an adult movie theater in Torrance and as a recruiter in the aerospace industry. For five years he worked at Video Archives, a video store in Manhattan Beach, California, where he became known locally for his extensive film knowledge. In 1986, he worked alongside Video Archives colleague Roger Avary as a production assistant on Dolph Lundgren's exercise video Maximum Potential. Before his time at Video Archives, he had co-written Love Birds in Bondage with Scott Magill, a short film he also produced and directed; all footage was destroyed following Magill's suicide in 1987. Tarantino attended acting classes at the James Best Theatre Company and in 1987 co-wrote and directed My Best Friend's Birthday, a film left uncompleted, though portions of its dialogue were later incorporated into True Romance. In 1988, he appeared as an Elvis impersonator in the episode "Sophia's Wedding: Part 1" during the fourth season of The Golden Girls, broadcast on November 19 of that year. He estimated the role paid approximately $650 initially, with roughly $3,000 in residuals accumulated over three years due to the episode's repeated rebroadcast.

Tarantino's filmmaking career began in earnest after meeting producer Lawrence Bender at a friend's barbecue, where he described an unwritten dialogue-driven heist film. He wrote the screenplay in three and a half weeks, and Bender forwarded it through contacts to director Monte Hellman, who helped secure financing. Harvey Keitel also read the script, contributed to the budget, and took a co-producer credit as well as a role in the film. Released in January 1992, Reservoir Dogs — in which Tarantino wrote, directed, and acted as Mr. Brown — screened at the Sundance Film Festival and received strong critical response. His screenplay True Romance was optioned and released in 1993, and he sold a second script for Natural Born Killers, though he later disowned the final film after it was revised by other writers. He also performed uncredited rewrites on It's Pat (1994), Crimson Tide (1995), and The Rock (1996).

Rather than accepting studio offers for projects including Speed (1994) and Men in Black (1997), Tarantino traveled to Amsterdam to write Pulp Fiction. The 1994 crime film, which he wrote, directed, and acted in, won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, shared with Roger Avary. The film received additional nominations including Best Picture and Best Director. Tarantino next wrote and starred in the action horror film From Dusk till Dawn (1996), and his third directorial effort, Jackie Brown (1997), paid homage to blaxploitation films. In 1998, Tarantino appeared on Broadway in Wait Until Dark, marking his entry into live theatrical performance.

He wrote and directed the two-part martial arts film Kill Bill, with Volume 1 released in 2003 and Volume 2 in 2004, the two parts together regarded as a single work. The exploitation-slasher film Death Proof (2007) was released as part of a double feature with director Robert Rodriguez under the collective title Grindhouse. Inglourious Basterds (2009) presented an alternate account of World War II, and Django Unchained (2012), a slave revenge Spaghetti Western, earned Tarantino his second Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. His eighth film, The Hateful Eight (2015), a revisionist Western thriller, opened with a roadshow release. His ninth film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), a comedy-drama set during the late 1960s transition from Old Hollywood to New Hollywood, was followed in 2021 by his debut novel, a novelization of the film. Across his career, Tarantino has received two Academy Awards, two BAFTA Awards, and four Golden Globe Awards, with his films collectively grossing more than $1.9 billion worldwide. He has stated tentative plans for a tenth film that would serve as his final directorial work before retiring from filmmaking.