Danny DeVito Biography Quotes 21 Report mistakes

Early Life and Background

Daniel Michael DeVito Jr. was born on November 17, 1944, in Neptune Township, New Jersey, and grew up in nearby Asbury Park in a tight Italian-American, working-class world shaped by postwar Catholic routines, boardwalk commerce, and the blunt comedy of people who had to hustle. Short in stature due to multiple epiphyseal dysplasia, he learned early that attention could be won not by looming but by timing - by turning a room, a glance, or a pause into leverage. The era offered few ready-made frames for a body like his; the solution was performance, not apology.

Home was practical and loud, with family expectations oriented toward steady work rather than artistic risk. Yet the proximity to New York and the electrifying churn of mid-century American entertainment made escape imaginable. DeVito carried an outsider's double vision: intimate knowledge of ordinary striving and a growing appetite to puncture pretension. That tension - belonging and estrangement at once - would later fuel characters who are both lovable and unsettling, comic and corrosive.

Education and Formative Influences

After early schooling in New Jersey, DeVito trained in cosmetics and hairdressing before redirecting himself toward acting, an abrupt pivot that reads like a biography of American mobility in miniature. He studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, absorbing stage discipline, voice work, and the practical craft of surviving auditions. The city in the 1960s and early 1970s - experimental theater, ethnic standup, character actors building careers one part at a time - suited him. He learned to treat "type" not as a cage but as a toolkit: specificity as freedom.

Career, Major Works, and Turning Points

DeVito broke through nationally as Louie De Palma on the TV sitcom "Taxi" (1978-1983), a performance that turned a petty tyrant into a comic engine and won him an Emmy and a Golden Globe. Film roles followed that used his compact intensity as a kind of narrative accelerant: "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" (1975), "Terms of Endearment" (1983), and then a run of darker, bolder work in the late 1980s and 1990s, including "Ruthless People" (1986), "Throw Momma from the Train" (1987, which he also directed), "Twins" (1988), "Batman Returns" (1992), and "Get Shorty" (1995). As a director he favored moral pressure-cookers and satirical fables - "The War of the Roses" (1989), "Hoffa" (1992), and "Matilda" (1996) - while as a producer through Jersey Films (founded with Michael Shamberg and Stacey Sher) he helped bring adult, character-driven Hollywood to the screen, notably "Pulp Fiction" (1994) and later "Erin Brockovich" (2000) and "Man on the Moon" (1999). In the 2000s he reinvented his TV persona again as Frank Reynolds on "Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia" (2006-), embracing ugliness, vanity, and slapstick nihilism with fearless commitment.

Philosophy, Style, and Themes

DeVito's art is built on an unsentimental empathy for strivers. He plays small men who crave control, but he refuses to let them be merely symbolic; they are human-sized disasters whose appetites expose the rules of the room. His comedy relies on candor and the physical fact of bodies in space - bodies sweating, stumbling, bleeding, desiring - because he understands that dignity is often a performance we rent by the hour. That tactile worldview also informs his directing: tight compositions, brisk pacing, and a taste for ethical traps where love curdles into ownership and humor becomes the last defense against shame.

Underneath the jokes is a pragmatic suspicion of institutions and a preference for messy, negotiated humanity. "Of course I've got lawyers. They are like nuclear weapons, I've got em 'cause everyone else has. But as soon as you use them they screw everything up". The line is comic, but it also reveals an artist who sees power as corrosive even when necessary - a theme that runs from the marital war zone of "The War of the Roses" to the corporate and political backrooms around "Hoffa". At the same time, he has a maker's gratitude for the act of building stories from fragments: "So, you pick this stuff here and this stuff there and then you see things in certain ways and you start visualizing and thank God I get the chance to do this. It's really the greatest thing in the whole wide world". And he meets chaos not with denial but with comic acceptance, the private loneliness of production turning into material: "I'm shooting in Brooklyn, we've got all kinds of crap going on, and I'm all alone now in a big hotel suite that you can't believe the size of it and a thing sticks in my foot and I just think it's the funniest thing that's ever happened to me". Legacy and Influence
DeVito endures because he expanded what a leading comic actor could look like and what a "character actor" could control. He helped bridge New Hollywood grit and mainstream entertainment, then later modeled a third act defined by risk, not respectability, using "Always Sunny" to push sitcom depravity into a new key. As a producer and director he backed films that trusted adult audiences and idiosyncratic voices, while his performances normalized a kind of fearless physical honesty - the idea that presence is not height but precision. In an era that often rewards polish, DeVito's lasting influence is his permission: to be specific, strange, and fully committed, and to make that commitment funny enough to disarm, then sharp enough to sting.