Adam Richard Sandler (born September 9, 1966)
Adam Sandler was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Judy, a nursery school teacher, and Stanley Sandler, an electrical engineer. When he was five, his family moved to Manchester, New Hampshire, where he attended Manchester Central High School. He found he was a natural comic, and nurtured his talent while at New York University by performing regularly in clubs and on campuses. He graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1991. In the mid to late 1980s, Sandler played Theo Huxtable's friend, Smitty, on The Cosby Show (1987–1988). He was a performer for the MTV game show Remote Control, on which he made appearances as the characters "Trivia Delinquent" or "Stud Boy". Sandler's first starring role was in 1989, in the film Going Overboard. In 1995, he starred in Billy Madison, in which he plays a grown, though uneducated, man repeating grades 1–12 to earn back his father's respect, along with the right to inherit his father's multi-million-dollar hotel empire. He starred in the film I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry (2007) alongside Kevin James, as a New York City fireman pretending to be gay to keep up an insurance scam so that his best friend's children can have benefits. Sandler headlined You Don't Mess with the Zohan (2008), a comedy about a Mossad agent who fakes his own death and moves to the United States to become a hair stylist. Adam also made his own film production company, Happy Madison Productions, in 1999.
