Jimmy Fallon Biography

A charming, energetic, tousle-haired young comic actor born in Brooklyn and raised in upstate New York, Jimmy Fallon began his stand-up career at age seventeen and first appeared as a featured performer on "Saturday Night Live" a week after his twenty-fourth birthday. Dropping out of college in 1996, just a semester shy of graduation, Fallon headed to Los Angeles and trained with The Groundlings, the famed improvisational theater company. A guest role on the ABC series "Spin City" marked his screen debut in March of 1998, six months before his lifelong dream of starring on the sketch series that debuted a year after his birth would come true.

Impressing Lorne Michaels in an audition where he impersonated John Travolta and Adam Sandler, Fallon landed a featured spot on "Saturday Night Live". Quickly winning over audiences with his unbridled comic excitement, sharp timing and fresh-faced hipness, the performer was soon a favorite, thanks to his good-natured reworkings of current top pop hits and recurring characters like Sully, the rowdy high school-age Bostonian with a demonstrative girlfriend (Rachel Dratch) and video camera always in tow, entertainment journalist Pat O'Brien and a host of others. Fallon was promoted to regular cast member beginning in the 1999-2000 season, and also took on co-anchoring duties for the series "Weekend Update" segment with writer Tina Fey beginning in 2000. That same year, the young actor was rendered almost unrecognizable with a beard and older demeanor made his pleasing feature film debut as joyless band manager Dennis Hope in Cameron Crowe's semi-autobiographical rock and roll homage "Almost Famous". Versatile and appealing with an irresistible boy-next-door genuineness, Fallon quickly became a comic with young heartthrob stauts--even when he flubbed lines or shamelessly borrowed from SNL castmembers past, it seemed endearing.

After high-profile awards hosting gigs on MTV, Fallon's acting career continued to grow: he was cast in a crucial role in Woody Allen's "Anything Else" (2003) and he took on his first major leading role in the action-comedy "Taxi" (2004), playing an experienced cop who commandeers a cab driven by a sassy, streetwise woman (Queen Latifah) to pursue a gang of beautiful thieves. That film floundered, but Fallon was much better served by his next outing, the romantic comedy "Fever Pitch" (2005), playing a sweet-natured schoolteacher whose idyllic romance with a corporate climber (Drew Barrymore) is threatened by his obsessive devotion to the Boston Red Sox. The film, directed by the Farrelly brothers from the Nick Hornby novel, was a warm-hearted, appealing confection that effectively showcased Fallon's innate likeability.