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Ben Affleck biography

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Quick Facts

Best Known For

Ben Affleck is best known for co-writing and acting in the 1997 film Good Will Hunting.

Synopsis

Ben Affleck is an actor and screenwriter whose big break was the Academy Award-winning Good Will Hunting.

Early Career

Actor, screenwriter. Born Benjamin Geza Affleck, on August 15, 1972, in Berkeley, California,to Chris and Tim Affleck. His parents separated soon after he was born, and officially divorced when he was 11. After the split, Affleck and his siblings moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Affleck's first acting experience came at the age of seven, when he appeared in The Dark End of the Street (1979), an independent film produced by a friend of the family. At the age of eight, Affleck appeared in a PBS production, The Voyage of the Mimi. That same year he met his future best friend, Matt Damon, a 10-year-old who lived two blocks away. The boys later attended the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School,where they both took drama classes. While still in high school, Affleck appeared in several network-TV dramas.

Affleck briefly attended the University of Vermont and California's Occidental College, but left to pursue his dreams of acting in Hollywood. His first major film was School Ties (1992), which also featured Matt Damon and Brendan Fraser. He then appeared as a bully in the cult classic, Dazed and Confused (1993). Ben was then part of an ensemble cast for director Kevin Smith's Mallrats (1995), and was the romantic lead in Smith's Chasing Amy (1997).

Big Break

In 1992, Affleck and Damon collaborated on a screenplay called Good Will Hunting about a troubled young math genius. After a long struggle to get the script produced, Miramax purchased the rights to the film in 1996. Starring Damon, Affleck, and Robin Williams, Good Will Hunting was released in 1997 to both critical and popular acclaim. Affleck and Damon won Golden Globe and Academy Awards for Best Original Screenplay, thrusting the friends into the public eye.

Affleck began getting a great deal of media coverage after the Oscars, which earned him several leading film roles. He starred alongside Bruce Willis and Liv Tyler in the blockbuster disaster movie, Armageddon (1998), which became the top-grossing movie of that year, earning over $520 million worldwide. That same year he landed a supporting turn in the popular film, Shakespeare in Love, which won a number of Academy Awards, including one for Best Picture.

Affleck made headlines when he began a high-profile romance with Gwyneth Paltrow, his co-star on the film Shakespeare in Love. The couple announced their breakup in late 1998, but the two remained good friends.

Affleck had less success in 1999 with Kevin Smith's irreverent comedy Dogma, co-starring Damon and Chris Rock. He also starred in

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