Shia LaBeouf

Birthdate: June 11, 1986
Birthplace: Los Angeles, California.

Shia La Beouf has gone from Even Stevens to to starring in this summer's biggest flick, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in the blink of an eye. Check out this rising star!

Funny Family

Shia (rhymes with hi-ya) LaBeouf was named after his grandfather, who is a comedian. Young Shia also liked making people laugh and used to perform a stand-up comedy act at local coffee joints around his neighborhood in California. After seeing a friend's performance on a TV show, Shia decided he should try acting too. His mom, Shayna LaBeouf, agreed and Shia began calling agents out of the yellow pages the very next day. He performed a stand-up piece for one, and was signed.

Career

Early work, 1996–2006

Prior to his acting career, LaBeouf's career as a comedian originated when he would "create things, story lines and fictitious tales" during his childhood; he practiced stand-up comedy around his neighborhood as an "escape" from a hostile environment. At the age of ten, he began performing stand-up and "talking dirty" at comedy clubs(including The Ice House in Pasadena), describing his appeal as having "disgustingly dirty" material and a "50-year-old mouth on the 10-year-old kid".LaBeouf, who described himself as an "insult comic", stated that his comic material included talking about his first erection and cursing. LaBeouf commented on his stand-up comedy career, "I just knew that money was a solution to whatever the hell was going on in my household. With money, I and my family would have had more options. So I went after a job that I thought I could make the most money for a 10-year-old or an 11-year-old boy."'LaBeouf subsequently found agent Teresa Dahlquist (who is his agent as of June 2008) through theYellow

pages. He was taken on after doing his stand-up act for her and pretending to be his own manager, promoting himself in the third person. LaBeouf has said that he initially became an actor because his family was broke, not because he wanted to pursue an acting career. LaBeouf commented, "My humor came from seeing my parents have sex, smoke weed, my mom being naked—just weird hippie stuff, twisted R-rated humor. I’d get up there in my OshKosh B’Gosh outfit and my bowl haircut. I was a little kid with a Lenny Bruce mouth. That was the act. But there’s no money in stand-up comedy, so I went into acting." LaBeouf began acting when he was 12 years old. His acting debut was on Caroline in the City, in the episode "Caroline and the Bar Mitzvah", and he made guest appearances on popular television shows:The X-Files, Touched by on Angel Jesse, and Suddenly Susan, all in 1999.

LaBeouf became well known among young audiences after playing Louis Stevens on the Disney Channel weekly program Even Stevens, a role for which he was cast three months after being signed by his agent. Even Stevens aired from 2000-2003 for three seasons and 65 episodes. Even Stevens ended with the Even Stevens Movie a TV movie which premiered June 13, 2003, on the Disney Channel . In 2003, LaBeouf was awarded a Daytime Emmy Award for the role of Louis and has said, "[he] grew up on that show" and his childhood was "kind of lost", although being cast in the show was the "best thing" that has happened to him. His father, having just been released from rehab, served as LaBeouf's on-set parent and the two bonded. Around this time period, LaBeouf pitched an arrangement to Disney inspired by his and his father's residence at motels. Disney bought the rights to the story, but the project, entitled Rent-A-Dad, has never moved out of development—presumably because the material may not have been suited to the family-oriented film studio. In 2001 LaBeouf had a supporting role in the Disney Channel TV movie Hounded, as Ronny Van Dussel, a rival of the main character. The following year he appeared in another Disney Channel TV movie Tru Confessions, where he played a mentally challenged kid with a sister who made a documentary about his disability.Gary Marsh, President of Entertainment for Disney Channel Worldwide, described LaBeouf as giving an "unbelievable acting performance", and stated, "to this day I believe [that performance] gave him the leverage and credibility to get a lot of other roles. During this time, LaBeouf also appeared in sketch shows on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno

In 2003, he appeared in another Disney production, Holes , as Stanley "Caveman" Yelnats IV, opposite Jon Voight. While filming Holes, Voight lent LaBeouf acting books that turned him on to the notion that acting could be about more than just a paycheck. The film was a moderate box office success. Stven Spielberg was a fan of LaBeouf in Holes, saying he reminded him of a young Tom Hanks. The film Holes made over US$ 67 million worldwide and was well-received by critics, garnering a 77% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. That same year, he was heavily featured in the HBO documentary show Project Greenlight which chronicled the making of the independent film The BattleHeights, his first PG-13S film. In the film, LaBeouf played the lead role of troubled teen Kelly Ernswiler. The Battle of Shaker Heights was theatrically released on August 22, 2003, in limited release and had a poor box office performance. LaBeouf also had minor roles in the films, Charlie’s Angels:Full Throttle and Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd.

In 2004, LaBeouf co-wrote and directed the short film Let's Love Hate with Lorenzo Eduardo, which was LaBeouf's directorial debut. Also in 2004, LaBeouf played Farber, a minor role in I, Robot Sand, the following year, appeared in the action-horror film Constantine as Chas Kramer, a supporting characterLaBeouf made his transition into more mature roles, playing the lead role in the 2005 Disney film The Greatest Game Ever played, as Francis Ouimet, a real-life golfer from a poor family who won the 1913 U.S. Open Championship. He also voiced the character Asbel in the English dubbed version of the 1984 film Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, a Japanese anime film directed by Hayao Miyazaki LaBeouf appeared in the 2006 ensemble drama Bobby as Cooper, a campaign volunteer for Robert F. Kennedy .As part of the cast of Bobby, LaBeouf won a Hollywood Film Award for "Ensemble Of The Year", and was nominated for a Screen Actors Guild A ward for "Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture".Also in 2006, LaBeouf played the younger version of Dito Montiel in A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, the older version being played by Robert Downey, Jr.in a semi-autobiographical account of Montiel's upbringing in 1980s Astoria,Queens In her review for the film, Lisa Schwarzbaum, of Entertainment Weekly , described LaBeouf as being "lavishly talented".