Christopher Knight biography

Synopsis

Child Actor

Actor. Born Christopher Anton Knight on November 7, 1957, in Manhattan, New York. He is the second of four children, three boys and one girl. His father, Edward Knight, was a struggling actor who moved the family to Los Angeles when Knight was only 3 years old. With his father struggling to make ends meet as an actor, Knight began auditioning for parts at age 7 in hopes of earning money to save for college. He became successful as a child actor almost immediately, landing spots on commercials for Tide, Toyota and Cheerios, as well as guest spots on the television shows Gunsmoke and Mannix. However, Knight saw in his father the risks of pursuing an acting career. He recalls, "My dad was an actor, and a struggling one at that. I never really wanted to have the downside of that life & So I had a different view of dreams, being that they are not always necessarily positive."

Playing Peter Brady

Despite his reservations about acting, Knight continued auditioning and, in 1969, at the age of 11, he landed a role on the ABC show The Brady Bunch. The show revolves around a large blended family brought together by the marriage of Mike Brady, who has three sons, and Carol Brady, who has three daughters. Knight played the middle son, Peter Brady. While the show never received especially high ratings during its1969-1974 first run, its reruns found a huge audience in syndication and The Brady Bunch has since become one of the most enduring and popular shows in the history of American television. "The Bradys weren't cool," Knight says. "If there was any cool factor to them, they would have disappeared after they left the airwaves. It's because what we were doing was timeless, but at that period of time it wasn't appreciated as much. It's appreciated more so now and all the more as it continues to live and breathe in perpetuity."

Knight continued to attend Los Angeles public schools while starring in The Brady Bunch, often struggling to maintain a low profile and normal life. He remembers, "Here I am, a seventh grader, recognized, and it's the worst time in the world to have anyone's attention. By eighth grade, I wouldn't react to people teasing me. I would laugh with them, at myself." After The Brady Bunch went off the air in 1974, Knight left the world of show business and enrolled at UCLA. He said, "I lived in a dorm, joined a fraternity ... did the whole college thing!" But after two years, Knight dropped out of college and returned to acting. He landed minor television roles and starred in a host of Brady Bunch spin-offs and sequels including The Brady Bunch Variety Hour (1976), The Brady Girls Get Married (1981) and A Very Brady Christmas (1988).