Quentin Tarantino

Quentin Jerome Tarantino (/ˌtærənˈtiːnoʊ/ TA-rən-TEE-noh; born March 27, 1963) is an American filmmaker, actor, and author. His films are characterized by graphic violence, extended dialogue often featuring much profanity, and references to popular culture. His work has earned a cult following alongside critical and commercial success; he has been named by some as the most influential director of his generation and has received numerous awards and nominations, including two Academy Awards, two BAFTA Awards, and four Golden Globe Awards. His films have grossed more than $1.9 billion worldwide.

Tarantino began his career with the independent crime film Reservoir Dogs (1992). His second film, the crime comedy-drama Pulp Fiction (1994), was a major success and won numerous awards, including the Cannes Film Festival's Palme d'Or and the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. He next wrote and starred in the action horror film From Dusk till Dawn (1996). His third film as director, Jackie Brown (1997), paid homage to blaxploitation films.

Tarantino wrote and directed the martial arts films Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003) and Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004), with both volumes combined regarded as a single film. He then made the exploitation-slasher film Death Proof (2007), which was part of a double feature with From Dusk till Dawn director Robert Rodriguez, released under the collective title Grindhouse. His next film, Inglourious Basterds (2009), followed an alternate account of World War II. He followed this with Django Unchained (2012), a slave revenge Spaghetti Western which won him his second Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. His eighth film, The Hateful Eight (2015), was a revisionist Western thriller and opened to audiences with a roadshow release.

Tarantino's ninth and most recent film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), was a comedy-drama set in the late 1960s about the transition of Old Hollywood to New Hollywood; his debut novel, a novelization of the film, was published in 2021. He has tentative plans for his tenth film to be his last before retiring from filmmaking.

Quentin Jerome Tarantino was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, on March 27, 1963, the only child of Connie McHugh and aspiring actor Tony Tarantino, who left the family before his son's birth. He has claimed to have Cherokee ancestry through his mother, who was also of Irish descent, while his father was Italian-American. He was named in part after Quint Asper, Burt Reynolds's character in the TV series Gunsmoke. Tarantino's mother met his father during a trip to Los Angeles; after a brief marriage and divorce, she left Los Angeles and moved to Knoxville, where her parents lived, and returned to Los Angeles with her son in 1966.

Tarantino's mother married musician Curtis Zastoupil soon after arriving in Los Angeles, and the family moved to nearby Torrance, California. Zastoupil accompanied Tarantino to numerous film screenings while his mother allowed him to see more mature movies, such as Carnal Knowledge (1971) and Deliverance (1972). After his mother divorced Zastoupil in 1973 and received a misdiagnosis of Hodgkin's lymphoma, Tarantino was again sent to live with his grandparents in Knoxville. Less than a year later, he returned to Torrance.

At the age of 14, Tarantino wrote one of his earliest works, a screenplay called Captain Peachfuzz and the Anchovy Bandit that was based on the 1977 film Smokey and the Bandit. He later revealed that his mother had ridiculed his writing skills when he was younger, and he subsequently vowed never to share any of his future wealth with her. As a 15-year-old, he was grounded by his mother for shoplifting Elmore Leonard's novel The Switch from a Kmart. He was allowed to leave only to attend the Torrance Community Theater, where he participated in such plays as Two Plus Two Makes Sex and Romeo and Juliet. The same year, he dropped out of Narbonne High School in Harbor City.

Through the 1980s, Tarantino had a number of jobs. After lying about his age, he worked as an usher at an adult movie theater in Torrance, called the Pussycat Theater. He spent time as a recruiter in the aerospace industry, and for five years he worked at Video Archives, a video store in Manhattan Beach, California. He was well known in the local community for his film knowledge and video recommendations; Tarantino stated, "When people ask me if I went to film school, I tell them, 'No, I went to films." In 1986, Tarantino was employed in his first Hollywood job, working with Video Archives colleague Roger Avary, as production assistants on Dolph Lundgren's exercise video, Maximum Potential.