+ Matthew Perry
| Matthew Langford perry was born on August 19, 1969, in Williamstown, Massachusetts. | |
| His parents divorced when he was less than a year old and Perry moved with his mother, Suzanne Perry Morrison, to her hometown of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. She remarried to Keith Morrison (NBC newscaster) and she worked as a press secretary for Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. His father John Bennett Perry (actor who played in Fools Rush In) remarried to Debbie Perry. He has four half sisters named Caitlin (father: Keith Morrison; born 1981), Emily (father: Keith Morrison born 1985), Madeleine (father: Keith Morrison born 1989) and Marie Perry, and a half brother named Willy (father: Keith Morrison born 1987). |
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| Matthew went to a private school in Sherman Oaks, California called Buckley School, followed by Ashbury College, Ottawa, Ontario Canada. A talented tennis player, Matthew was ranked No. 2 among junior players in Canada when he was 13 years old. At virtually the same time, he discovered acting, earning his first applause for his role in a seventh-grade production called The Life and Death of Sneaky Fitch. When he was 15, Matthew decided to move to Los Angeles to spend some time with his father, an actor best known to audiences as the smooth-faced sailor on a series of commercials for Old Spice. |
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| Soon after Matthew lost his first big U.S. tennis match, his acting career kicked into gear when director William Richert spotted him in a Los Angeles restaurant and asked him to audition for his movie, A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon , starring River Phoenix. Perry accepted the role, which marked his first significant professional acting experience. Shortly after his graduation from high school, Matthew landed the lead in a short-lived sitcom called Second Chance. After the show was cancelled after just one season in 1987-88, Matthew began a series of guest appearances on more successful sitcoms from which most notably Growing Pains. He also appeared in the 1989 film She�s Out of Control and had more significant roles in several TV movies. Matthew starred in another doomed sitcom in 1992 called Home Free which again lasted only one season. |
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| In 1994, Matthew and his longtime friend and writing partner Andrew Hill Newman sent the pilot for a sitcom called Maxwell�s House, about a group of twentysomething friends, to the NBC television network. Ultimately, NBC scrapped the script in favor of a similar sitcom already in the works. The resilient Perry auditioned for the other show, with the temporary title Friends Like Us, and got the role of Chandler Bing, the terminally wisecracking member of the titular gang of six young New Yorkers. |
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| Although he has a shining career, Matthew has also made headlines for his personal problems, including a 1997 stint in a rehab clinic after he became addicted to painkillers. He was again hospitalized in May 2000, this time for a serious stomach ailment. Shortly after his release from the hospital, Perry was involved in a car accident in which he drove his Porsche into the porch of a Hollywood Hills home after reportedly swerving to avoid another car. In the spring of 2000, in the middle of filming Friends as well as his next big screen project, Servicing Sara, Perry was admitted to a rehabilitation clinic again, this time for undisclosed reasons. He returned briefly to the set of Friends to film the season's last two episodes, but he still was confined to rehab. |
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| � 2000 The Whole Nine Yards � 1999 Three to Tango � 1998 Almost Heroes � 1997 Fools Rush In � 1995 Microsoft Windows 95 Video Guide � 1994 Getting In � 1994 Parallel Lives � 1993 Deadly Relations � 1993 Home Free � 1990 Call Me Anna � 1990 Sydney � 1989 She's Out of Control � 1988 A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon � 1988 Dance 'Til Dawn � 1987 Second Chance |