Good Will Hunting started as a 40-page class assignment at Harvard
In 1992 Matt Damon wrote 40 pages for a Harvard playwriting class and roped in his childhood friend Ben Affleck to perform scenes with him. Five years later the finished script won them an Oscar, making Affleck, at 25, the youngest person ever to win one for screenwriting.
Affleck was born in Berkeley, California, on 15 August 1972 and grew up mostly in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His mother taught elementary school; his father, a would-be playwright, drifted between odd jobs, including janitor at Harvard, and struggled badly with alcohol, at one point spending two years homeless before getting sober in a California rehab centre where he later worked as a counsellor. His mother's friendship with a local casting director got Ben and his younger brother Casey into auditions, and he acted professionally from age seven. She banked his earnings for college and hoped he would become a teacher.
His biggest childhood job was the PBS science series The Voyage of the Mimi, made for sixth-graders, which he filmed on and off from eight to fifteen, and a year travelling Mexico taught him Spanish. At Cambridge Rindge and Latin he grew close to Damon, whom he had known since age eight; the two pooled money in a joint bank account to pay for trips to New York auditions. Small parts followed, notably a school bully in Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused, and Kevin Smith rescued him from typecasting by writing him the lead in Chasing Amy.
The Good Will Hunting script grew largely out of improvisation after Damon moved into Affleck's Los Angeles flat, drawing on their Cambridge upbringing, and was meant partly as a showcase for themselves. They sold it to Castle Rock in 1994, fell out over who should direct, and moved it to Miramax, where Gus Van Sant made it with Robin Williams.
Studio stardom followed with Armageddon, though Michael Bay initially dismissed him as a geek and insisted on weight loss, a tan and capped teeth. After a slump he returned as a director: Argo won the Academy Award for Best Picture, part of a tally of two Oscars, two BAFTAs and three Golden Globes.
Source: Ben Affleck
