Tyler Perry's first play flopped, so he rewrote it for six years
At 22 Tyler Perry spent his entire 12,000 dollars of savings staging a musical in an Atlanta community theatre. Almost nobody came. He kept rewriting it for six years until a 1998 restaging finally worked, and that stubbornness built the Madea empire and a fortune estimated at 1 billion dollars.
He was born Emmitt Perry Jr. in New Orleans on September 13, 1969, and has called his childhood a living hell under an abusive father figure. Church each week was his refuge. At 16 he legally changed his first name to Tyler to put distance between himself and Emmitt Sr., whom a later DNA test showed was not his biological father. He left high school without finishing but earned a GED.
The spark came from The Oprah Winfrey Show, where a guest described writing as a way to work through one's own troubles. Perry began writing letters to himself, which grew into the musical I Know I've Been Changed, dealing with forgiveness, self-worth and child abuse. After moving to Atlanta around 1990, he staged it in 1992; reviews were poor and it lost money. The retooled 1998 version played the House of Blues and then the Fox Theatre, and he took his shows on the touring urban theatre circuit, winning a devoted African-American audience. By 2005 Forbes counted over 100 million dollars in ticket sales.
Ticket money helped fund his first film, Diary of a Mad Black Woman, made for 5.5 million dollars. Critics gave it a 16 percent approval rating, yet it earned 50.6 million dollars domestically. Perry directed its follow-up, Madea's Family Reunion, which opened at number one in 2006, and he has played the formidable grandmother Madea, created on stage in 1999, ever since. He keeps full copyright through Tyler Perry Films, with Lionsgate co-producing and distributing.
Television multiplied the business. A successful ten-episode test run of House of Payne led TBS to sign a 100-episode deal worth 200 million dollars. Forbes named him the top-earning man in entertainment in 2011. Critics and scholars have argued that his work trades in negative portrayals of African Americans, but the Academy gave him its Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 2021.
Source: Tyler Perry
