Difference between revisions of "Conan O'Brien"

Revision as of 08:50, March 20, 2008

Biography

Early life

Conan O'Brien was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. He is the third of six children in an Irish American family, one of four boys. His father, Dr. Thomas O'Brien, was a research physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, specializing in infectious diseases. His mother, Ruth Reardon O'Brien, is a former partner of the Boston law firm of Ropes & Gray. ^[1] His sister Jane is a comedy writer and producer.

After graduating as the valedictorian from Brookline High School (Brookline, Massachusetts), O'Brien entered Harvard University. Throughout his college career, he was a writer for the Harvard Lampoon humor magazine. During his sophomore and junior years, O'Brien served as the Lampoon's president, making him only the second person ever to serve as president twice, and the first person to have done it in 85 years. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 1985 with a concentration in History and Literature.

Television career

O'Brien moved to Los Angeles upon graduating from Harvard to join the writing staff of HBO's Not Necessarily the News. He spent two years with that show, and performed regularly with improvisational groups like The Groundlings. He also acted in corporate infomercials to earn money during this period.

After Not Necessarily the News, O'Brien partnered with Harvard classmate Greg Daniels (who went on to be the executive producer of King of The Hill and The Office) as staff writers on the short-lived Wilton North Report for Fox Broadcasting. He also occasionally served as the show's live audience warm-up person. Wilton North, with former Letterman producer Barry Sand as executive producer, lasted only 4 weeks, and is noteworthy mostly as the show that bumped the Arsenio Hall-hosted Late Show off the air.

In January 1988, Saturday Night Live's executive producer Lorne Michaels hired O'Brien as a writer. During his 3½ years on SNL he wrote such recurring sketches as "Mr. Short-Term Memory" and "The Girl Watchers," the latter of which was first performed by Tom Hanks and Jon Lovitz. O'Brien also wrote the sketch "Nude Beach", which became infamous due to the fact that the word penis appeared in it no fewer than 42 times, much of it in the form of song ^[2]. In 1989, he and the other SNL writers were awarded an Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing in a Comedy or Variety Series. O'Brien, like many SNL writers, occasionally appeared as an extra in sketches; uncommonly in a speaking role. One of his most visible apperances was a sketch in which Tom Hanks was inducted into the SNL "Five Timers Club" for hosting his fifth episode. O'Brien played the doorman who takes Hanks's coat. Years later, when Hanks was a guest on Late Night, O'Brien showed the clip and jokingly claimed their appearance together was the source of all of Hanks's subsequent success.

While on a writers' strike from Saturday Night Live following the 1987-1988 season, O'Brien put on an improvisational comedy revue in Chicago with fellow SNL writers Bob Odenkirk and Robert Smigel called Happy Happy Good Show.

In the spring of 1991, O'Brien left SNL to write and produce a pilot for the television show Lookwell, starring Adam West. It was broadcast on NBC in July but was not picked up as a series. That fall, O'Brien signed on as a writer and producer for the Fox series The Simpsons, where he also became a supervising producer. In a speech he gave at Harvard on Class Day in 2000, O'Brien credited The Simpsons with "saving" him, a reference to the career slump he was experiencing prior to his hiring for that show ^[3].

During his time as a writer for The Simpsons, he created the character of Captain Horatio McCallister (the Sea Captain) and he named Patty and Selma Bouvier's iguana Jub-Jub (something Conan would say during awkward silences while writing). Of the episodes he wrote while there, he considers "Marge vs. the Monorail" to be his favorite.

Since 1993 he has hosted Late Night With Conan O'Brien, taking over after David Letterman left the network for CBS. He is currently contracted through to 2009. He is set to take over The Tonight Show, as Jay Leno has announced he will retire in 2009.

Family

On January 12, 2002, O’Brien married former advertising copywriter Liza Powel in her hometown of Seattle, Washington, in a nuptial Mass at St. James Cathedral. Elizabeth Ann Powel was born November 12, 1970, is from Bainbridge Island, Washington (near Seattle), and is the daughter of Seattle Dixieland band-leader Jake Powel.^[4] They met in the spring of 2000 when Foote, Cone & Belding (FCB),^[5] the advertising agency she worked for, redesigned the television commercials for O'Brien's Houston sponsor, Hilton Furniture.

They have a daughter, Neve, born on October 14, 2003 in New York City, and a son, Beckett, born November 9, 2005 in New York City.^[6]

O'Brien is a distant cousin of actor and comedian Denis Leary through marriage.