Paul Reiser (born March 30, 1957) is an American stand-up comedian, actor, television personality, author, screenwriter and musician. He is most widely known for his role on the long-running television sitcom Mad About You. Reiser was born in New York City, the son of Helen, a homemaker, and Sam Reiser, a wholesale health food distributor.[1] Reiser attended the East Side Hebrew Institute on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and graduated from Stuyvesant High School in New York City.[2] He earned his bachelor's degree at Binghamton University, where he majored in music (piano, composition). He was active in campus theater productions and founded "The Little Theater That Could", an on-campus community theater organization located in Hinman College, Reiser's dorm community. It was later renamed Hinman Production Company.[3] Reiser eventually found his calling when he performed in New York City comedy clubs during university summer breaks. After honing his skills as a stand-up comic in New York City, he had a breakout film role in 1982 when he appeared in Diner, a coming-of-age film by Barry Levinson. Reiser's character, Modell, a closet stand-up comedian, effectively brought Reiser's comic abilities to the attention of Hollywood. The film also helped boost the careers of his co-stars Kevin Bacon, Steve Guttenberg, and Mickey Rourke. He followed this success playing a detective in 1984's Beverly Hills Cop, a role he reprised in the 1987 sequel, Beverly Hills Cop II. Reiser also had roles in James Cameron's 1986 movie Aliens where he played the infamous character Burke; in The Marrying Man (1991), and in the comedy Bye Bye Love (1995).Reiser starred for two years on television as one of two possible fathers of a teenage girl in the sitcom My Two Dads, and later rose to fame in North America as Paul Buchman on Mad About You, a long-running comedy series he helped create in which Helen Hunt co-starred as his wife. He also played piano for the recording of the show's theme song. For his work in Mad About You, Reiser received nominations for an Emmy, a Golden Globe, an American Comedy Award, and a Screen Actors Guild award. In the successful show's final 1999 season, he and Hunt were paid US $1 million ($1.3 million today) per episode.[4] In 2001, Reiser took on a dramatic role as a man desperate to find his birth mother after learning he has a serious illness in the British television movie My Beautiful Son.(Wikipedia)
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