Before Hollywood, Danny DeVito styled hair, including for the dead
Long before he played Louie De Palma or the Penguin, Danny DeVito worked in his sister's New Jersey salon. After one customer passed away, her relatives wanted him to style her for the funeral, and he went on to work part-time as a morgue cosmetologist. Hunting for a makeup teacher eventually led him to drama school.
DeVito was born on November 17, 1944, in Neptune Township, New Jersey, and grew up in Asbury Park with his parents and two older sisters. His family traced its roots to San Fele in Basilicata and to the Italo-Albanian community of Calabria. At 14 he talked his father into sending him to boarding school, and he finished at Oratory Preparatory School in Summit in 1962. The salon job came next, and his search for professional makeup training took him to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where he graduated in 1966.
His break arrived in 1978 as the bullying dispatcher of the Sunshine Cab Company on Taxi, a part that won him both an Emmy and a Golden Globe. According to the story told about the audition, he stunned the show's creators by tossing the script onto the table and demanding to know who had written it. He had already played Martini in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in 1975, a role he had first taken in the 1971 off-Broadway staging.
Film stardom followed. He appeared in Terms of Endearment, which took the Best Picture Oscar, paired with Arnold Schwarzenegger in Twins and Junior, and played Oswald Cobblepot in Tim Burton's Batman Returns in 1992. That same year he directed Hoffa, with Jack Nicholson in the title role. Since 2006 he has played Frank Reynolds on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, joining at the start of its second season.
Behind the camera, he and Michael Shamberg set up Jersey Films in 1991, with Stacey Sher soon becoming an equal partner; the company is associated with Pulp Fiction. He shared a Best Picture nomination as a producer of Erin Brockovich. On stage he made his West End debut in The Sunshine Boys in 2012 and reached Broadway in 2017 with Arthur Miller's The Price, which brought him a Tony nomination. One odd footnote: Pokemon fans gathered 40,000 signatures asking him to voice Detective Pikachu, but he declined to audition because he did not know the franchise.
Source: Danny DeVito
