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An overnight action film sensation who intrigued audiences when he seemingly emerged from nowhere in the summer of 2001, Vin Diesel actually made his first mark on the movie business as a filmmaker. His first two independent films screened at the Cannes and Sundance Film Festivals after which the hulking, clean-shaven actor was snapped up by Hollywood and transformed into a movie star with high-octane hits “The Fast and the Furious” (2001) and “XXX” (2002). Diesel went on to receive decent reviews for his dramatic performance in “Find me Guilty” (2005), and found box office success with the Disney comedy “The Pacifier” (2005), but audiences were generally reluctant to accept him in anything but sequels to his breakout action films. The super-hype that surrounded the actor’s instant stardom quickly gave way to borderline has-been status, with the Diesel’s steadiest success coming in the form of seemingly endless revivals of his two best-known characters.
An overnight action film sensation who intrigued audiences when he seemingly emerged from nowhere in the summer of 2001, Vin Diesel actually made his first mark on the movie business as a filmmaker. His first two independent films screened at the Cannes and Sundance Film Festivals after which the hulking, clean-shaven actor was snapped up by Hollywood and transformed into a movie star with high-octane hits “The Fast and the Furious” (2001) and “XXX” (2002). Diesel went on to receive decent reviews for his dramatic performance in “Find me Guilty” (2005), and found box office success with the Disney comedy “The Pacifier” (2005), but audiences were generally reluctant to accept him in anything but sequels to his breakout action films. The super-hype that surrounded the actor’s instant stardom quickly gave way to borderline has-been status, with the Diesel’s steadiest success coming in the form of seemingly endless revivals of his two best-known characters.
Born Mark Sinclair Vincent in New York City, NY on July 18, 1967, Vin Diesel began acting with the Theatre for the New City at the age of seven. After studying English at Hunter College, he began penning screenplays and making films. His short "Multi-Facial" debuted at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival and his first full-length feature, "Strays" (1997) premiered in competition at the Sundance Film Festival. Written, co-produced, directed and starring Diesel, "Strays" was an ensemble drama about male friendships that many compared – sometimes unfavorably – with "Saturday Night Fever" (1977) and "Diner" (1982).
Diesel gave another strong performance in the ensemble of the Wall Street-centered thriller "Boiler Room" (2000), but his true breakout came with his starring role as hard-driving car thief and street gang racer Dominic Toretto in the surprise summer blockbuster, "The Fast and the Furious" (2001), in which The New York Times critic Elvis Mitchell characterized Diesel as a "slacker Robert Mitchum, if that's not redundant." Diesel became an overnight sensation that summer, with the relative unknown fueling curiosity about himself by evading questions about his sexuality and his ethnic background, revealing only that he was part Italian and considered himself “a person of color.”
Appearing in only a brief cameo in the 2005 sequel “The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift,” Diesel tried to explore new territory with the sci-fi thriller “Babylon A.D.” (2008), adapted from the novel Babylon Babies by Maurice Georges Dantec. Diesel received a critical drubbing for the second-rate offering and retreated to a surefire hit territory by finally reprising his role in the fourth sequel “Fast & Furious” (2009), which reunited the cast of the original film. Unsurprisingly, the film broke box office records and reinvigorated Vin Diesel’s reputation as an action star. Meanwhile his distinctive voice continued to be one of his most valuable assets, and he lent it to the animated film “Rockfish” (2009) and video games “The Wheelmen” and “Chronicles of Riddick.”
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