| Quentin Tarantino  AKA Quentin Jerome Tarantino
Born: 27-Mar-1963
Birthplace: Knoxville, TN
Gender: Male
Race or Ethnicity: White
Sexual orientation: Straight
Occupation: Film Director, Screenwriter, Actor Nationality: United States
Executive summary: Pulp Fiction Quentin Tarantino is a high school dropout and old-movie buff who went to work in a video store, and went on to make some terrific movies himself. As a writer and director, he is a master of smart-ass dialogue, pop-culture references, and sinister characters, and his movies are stuffed with nods to earlier, often obscure movies -- sometimes in the dialogue, other times reprising entire scenes. He loves hiring forgotten actors who deserve to be remembered, and has revived the careers of Lawrence Tierney in Reservoir Dogs, John Travolta in Pulp Fiction, Pam Grier and Robert Forster in Jackie Brown, and David Carradine in Kill Bill.
As an actor, Tarantino's first professional work was as an Elvis impersonator on The Golden Girls in 1988, a gig that helped immensely through his later struggles, as he kept getting residual checks for the show's ongoing reruns. His first screenplay, Captain Peachfuzz and the Anchovy Bandit, never sold, and has never yet been filmed. His second screenplay was True Romance, which made a nifty action-thriller with Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette, but Tarantino didn't direct it. It was Reservoir Dogs that made Tarantino the It Boy in Hollywood, and his time-twisted Pulp Fiction is considered his masterpiece. It is the only Tarantino film that crossed the $100 million barrier at the box office, qualifying it as a mainstream blockbuster.
Tarantino lifted a lot of Reservoir Dogs from a subplot in a Chow Yun-Fat action thriller, Long hu feng yun (City on Fire). The two films tell substantially different stories, and Tarantino's film is better, but there's no denying the similarities -- an undercover cop infiltrating the criminals' gang, and eventually leveling about it after he's been shot, villains wearing sunglasses in slow-motion tough-guy strolling, the climactic Mexican standoff, and some very similar dialogue.
He worked as an actor in several films in the 1990s, to generally negative reviews. He co-starred with Harvey Keitel and George Clooney in From Dusk Till Dawn, and with Jennifer Aniston in Steven Spielberg's make-a-movie video game, Director's Chair. Tarantino has also played a recurring role on Alias with Jennifer Garner.
He has earned a Billy Martin-esque reputation as a brawler, after fist fights with a cab driver, a producer of Natural Born Killers, and a stranger in a bar. He has also feuded publicly (but not thrown any punches) with Oliver Stone over Natural Born Killers, and with Spike Lee over the common use of the word 'nigger' in Tarantino's films.
Before he was famous, Tarantino was caught shoplifting a copy of an Elmore Leonard novel at a Kmart. Years later, his Jackie Brown was based on Leonard's Rum Punch. Father: Tony Tarantino (musician)
Mother: Connie (McHugh) Zastoupil (office worker)
Sister: Tanya Marie (nurse, b. 4-Oct-1964)
Sister: Ronnajean Tarantino Murphy (anti-abortion activist, b. 22-Jun-1969)
Brother: Edward Tarantino (half-brother, lumberjack, b. 3-Oct-1974)
Father: Curt Zastoupil (stepfather, musician)
Girlfriend: Mira Sorvino (dated 1996-98)
Girlfriend: Sofia Coppola
Girlfriend: Margaret Cho
Girlfriend: Allison Anders
Girlfriend: Kathy Griffin (dated early 1990s)
Girlfriend: Julie Dreyfus (actress, Kill Bill Vol. 2)
High School: (dropped out)
Edgar Allan Poe Award Best Motion Picture, for Pulp Fiction (1995)
Oscar for Best Screenplay 1995 for Pulp Fiction, with Roger Avary
Battery allegedly punched Leila Mwangi at the Three of Cups restaurant, Manhattan, NY (May-1998)
Shoplifting allegedly stole a copy of The Switch by Elmore Leonard from Kmart (1978)
Cherokee Ancestry Maternal side
Risk Factors: Marijuana, Ecstasy, LSD
FILMOGRAPHY AS DIRECTOR
Death Proof (22-May-2007)
Grindhouse (6-Apr-2007)
Sin City (1-Apr-2005)
Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (16-Apr-2004)
Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (10-Oct-2003)
Jackie Brown (25-Dec-1997)
Four Rooms (16-Sep-1995)
Pulp Fiction (14-Oct-1994)
Reservoir Dogs (23-Oct-1992)
FILMOGRAPHY AS ACTOR
Diary of the Dead (8-Sep-2007) [VOICE]
Sukiyaki Western Django (31-Aug-2007)
Planet Terror (21-Jun-2007)
Death Proof (22-May-2007)
Grindhouse (6-Apr-2007)
The Muppets' Wizard of Oz (27-Apr-2005) Himself
Planet of the Pitts (30-Nov-2004) Himself
Little Nicky (2-Nov-2000)
God Said, 'Ha!' (14-Mar-1998) Himself
Full Tilt Boogie (5-Sep-1997) Himself
Girl 6 (22-Mar-1996)
From Dusk Till Dawn (19-Jan-1996)
Four Rooms (16-Sep-1995)
Desperado (May-1995)
Destiny Turns on the Radio (28-Apr-1995)
Pulp Fiction (14-Oct-1994)
Somebody to Love (15-Sep-1994)
Sleep with Me (10-Sep-1994)
Reservoir Dogs (23-Oct-1992)
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