Early Years
Daniels was born on December 24, 1959, in Philadelphia and attended Radnor High School. After graduating, Daniels attended Lindenwood University in St. Charles, Missouri. He began his career in entertainment as a casting director and manager after a chance meeting with a Hollywood producer, working on such projects as Under the Cherry Moon and Purple Rain. He continued managing talent, including several Academy Award nominees and winners. The documentary My Big Break features Daniels early in his career when he was managing actor Wes Bentley who starred as Ricky Fitts in American Beauty. In the documentary a dynamic Daniels animatedly comments on Bentley's reluctance to capitalize on his newfound celebrity status. Lee has a sister Joyce Daniels Fennell from Philadelphia. Daniels and Joyce's father, Officer William Daniels, is from West Philadelphia. When he arrived in Hollywood, Daniels first worked for a nursing agency, then created his own agency at age 21. He sold his agency for approx $2 million and went to work as a production assistant. Later, he realized he had not paid taxes on his income but paid them off in time.
Read more about this topic: Lee Daniels
Famous quotes containing the words early years, early and/or years:
“I believe that if we are to survive as a planet, we must teach this next generation to handle their own conflicts assertively and nonviolently. If in their early years our children learn to listen to all sides of the story, use their heads and then their mouths, and come up with a plan and share, then, when they become our leaders, and some of them will, they will have the tools to handle global problems and conflict.”
—Barbara Coloroso (20th century)
“Humanity has passed through a long history of one-sidedness and of a social condition that has always contained the potential of destruction, despite its creative achievements in technology. The great project of our time must be to open the other eye: to see all-sidedly and wholly, to heal and transcend the cleavage between humanity and nature that came with early wisdom.”
—Murray Bookchin (b. 1941)
“On a late-winter evening in 1983, while driving through fog along the Maine coast, recollections of old campfires began to drift into the March mist, and I thought of the Abnaki Indians of the Algonquin tribe who dwelt near Bangor a thousand years ago.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)