Biography of Steve Guttenberg

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Steven Robert Guttenberg is an American actor, author, businessman, producer, and director. He is known for his lead roles in Hollywood films of the 1980s and 1990s, including Cocoon, Police Academy, Three Men and a Baby, Diner, The Bedroom Window, Three Men and a Little Lady, The Big Green, Short Circuit and Original Gangster. Guttenberg was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Ann Iris , a surgical assistant, and Jerome Stanley Guttenberg, an electrical engineer. He had a Jewish upbringing in the Flushing neighborhood of the borough of Queens before his family moved to North Massapequa, New York, where he graduated from Plainedge High School in 1976. During high school, he attended a summer program at the Juilliard School where he studied under John Houseman, and he won a role in an off-Broadway production of The Lion in Winter. After his high school graduation, he attended the State University of New York at Albany for a year. He moved to California to pursue an acting career. As Guttenberg recounts, within weeks he was cast in a Kentucky Fried Chicken commercial playing opposite Colonel Sanders. Guttenberg's film career has spanned four decades. He has been an actor, director, writer and producer. His production company, Mr. Kirby Productions, is named after Gerald J. Kirby, his high school drama teacher. After playing an uncredited bit part in Rollercoaster, Guttenberg had his first screen credit in the TV movie Something for Joey . He then played the starring role in the 1977 California high school comedy The Chicken Chronicles, set in Beverly Hills in 1969. He also appeared in the 1978 film The Boys From Brazil, based on the Ira Levin best seller, and guest starred on the show Family. Guttenberg starred in the short-lived TV series Billy , based on Billy Liar. He had a supporting role in the tennis romance film Players . In 1980, a Coca-Cola commercial featured him trying to help a non-English-speaking woman whose car stalled. Guttenberg starred in the TV-movie To Race the Wind playing blind lawyer Harold Krents. The same year he starred in the Nancy Walker-directed Can't Stop the Music, a semi-autobiographical movie about the disco group Village People. Guttenberg played Jim Craig in the TV movie Miracle on Ice . He appeared in Barry Levinson's Diner , then starred in another short-lived TV series No Soap, Radio . He starred in the action-comedy The Man Who Wasn't There and had a supporting part in the television movie The Day After . Guttenberg starred in The Ferret a pilot for a TV series that was not picked up.