Tom Shadyac - Background and Personal Life

Background and Personal Life

Shadyac was born in Falls Church, Virginia, to Julie and Richard Shadyac, a lawyer. His mother was Lebanese and his father was of half-Irish descent. His mother, Julie, who died of cancer in 1998, had become semi-quadriplegic and spent much of Shadyac's adult life in a wheelchair.

Shadyac graduated from J. E. B. Stuart High School in Falls Church, Virginia, in 1976 where he had played basketball, participated in the Key Club and made the Junior National and National Honor Societies. In both 1975 and 1976 Tom was included in Who's Who Among High School Students.

His older brother, Richard, was an attorney and is currently CEO of St. Jude's Children's Hospital fund-raising arm, ALSAC.

As a pre-law student at the University of Virginia, Shadyac produced a poster entitled "Are You a Preppie?" Borrowing from the style of National Lampoon and from the fact that preppies were in strong supply in Charlottesville and nearby Richmond, Virginia, the poster preceded the more famous The Official Preppy Handbook. The poster went into multiple printings and served as a fund-raiser for his fraternity, Sigma Chi.

He graduated from UVA in 1981, and later from UCLA Film School.

Shadyac married actress Jennifer Barker in June 1997; they subsequently divorced.

In 2007 Shadyac suffered post-concussion syndrome after a bicycle accident in Virginia, experiencing months of acute headaches and hyper-sensitivity to light and noise. The injury followed the cumulative effects of previous mild head injuries Shadyac had suffered surfing, mountain biking and playing basketball. He subsequently gave away his excess fortune (e.g., opening a homeless shelter in Charlottesville, Virginia and making a key donation to Telluride, Colorado's effort to set aside a natural area at the town's entrance), reoriented and simplified his life, sold his 17,000-square-foot (1,600 m2) Los Angeles mansion and moved into a trailer park – albeit the exclusive Paradise Cove park in Malibu.

He later began work on the documentary I Am – which explores his personal journey, "the nature of humanity" and "world's ever-growing addiction to materialism."