Early Life
Goodman was born in St. Louis, Missouri. His mother, Virginia Roos (née Loosmore), was a store clerk and waitress who worked at Jack and Phil's Bar-B-Que, while his father, Leslie F. Goodman, was a postal worker who died of a heart attack in 1954. He has a sister, Elisabeth Horvath, and a brother, Leslie.
Goodman went to Affton High School, where he played football and dabbled in theater. He won a football scholarship to Southwest Missouri State University, now Missouri State University. He pledged to Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity, but was not formally initiated until several years later. He discovered Southwest Missouri's drama program and studied there with actors Kathleen Turner and Tess Harper. After a college injury ended his football career, he decided to become a professional actor, leaving Missouri for New York in 1975.
With a small bankroll from his brother, Goodman found an apartment on Ninth Avenue and 51st street near the Theatre District, Manhattan, and attempted unsuccessfully to earn money as a bartender and waiter. He was soon to find modest success on stage, though, in commercials and in voice over performance. He was the person who slapped himself in the commercial for Skin Bracer by Mennen, saying the famous line "Thanks ... I needed that!". He performed off-Broadway and in dinner theatres, before landing character roles in movies during the early 1980s.
Read more about this topic: John Goodman
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early and/or life:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“Probably more than youngsters at any age, early adolescents expect the adults they care about to demonstrate the virtues they want demonstrated. They also tend to expect adults they admire to be absolutely perfect. When adults disappoint them, they can be critical and intolerant.”
—The Lions Clubs International and the Quest Nation. The Surprising Years, I, ch.4 (1985)
“Who shall describe the inexpressable tenderness and immortal life of the grim forest, where Nature, though it be midwinter, is ever in her spring, where the moss-grown and decaying trees are not old, but seem to enjoy a perpetual youth.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)