He is born December 18, 1963, in Shawnee, Oklahoma. Pitt grew up in Springfield, Missouri, the eldest of three children in a devoutly Southern Baptist family. His father owned a trucking company and his mother was a family counsellor. Pitt originally aspired to be an advertising art director, studying journalism at the University of Missouri. However, the young college student had other quiet aspirations, the product of a childhood “love of movies”. Pitt dropped out of college and headed West to pursue an acting career in Los Angeles. Pitt began dating Jennifer Aniston, star of the TV sitcom Friends, in 1998. Pitt and Aniston were married July 29, 2000, in Malibu, California. The couple lives in Los Angeles.

Pitt told his parents he intended to enrol in the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, but instead spent the next several months driving a limousine, chauffeuring strippers from one bachelor party to the next, delivering refrigerators and trying to break into the L.A. acting scene. He joined an acting class. After weathering only seven months in Los Angeles, Pitt had secured an agent and regular acting work.

Pitt’s first jobs came in television, appearing in episodes of Dallas. He made his big screen debut in 1989’s horror/slasher film Cutting Class. He also played Tristan in Legends of the fall—a stereotypical romantic hero with long, golden locks. However, he abruptly took a gritty turn as a detective on the trail of a serial killer in David Fincher’s disturbing and gory, Seven. In 1995, he starred as a mental patient in the psychological thriller 12 Monkeys and won a Golden Globe for best supporting actor. He followed with another dark thriller, Sleepers (1996) Devil’s Own with Harrison Ford, before heading to Argentina to film Seven Years in Tibet, his next film, and after that he played in the three-hour plus Meet Joe Black.