Thrive: 30 Inspirational Rags-to-Riches Stories

Vin Diesel

Vin Diesel was born Mark Vincent in Manhattan, New York. He was raised in Westbeth, a tax-subsidized housing project for poor artists in Downtown Manhattan, by his mother, a retired astrologist, and his African-American stepfather, an acting instructor and theater manager. He has a younger brother and sister, as well as a fraternal twin, Paul. He never knew his biological father. At age seven, he and six other boys broke into an off-off Broadway house called the Theater for the New City near his home in Manhattan's Greenwich Village with the intent to vandalize it. When they were caught, Vin was scared, thinking Crystal Field, head of the resident drama company, would call the police. Instead, she offered him a job. He was handed a script and given a salary of $20 per week. From that point on, Vin wanted to become a successful actor.

By age fifteen, Vin was breakdancing for coins and lifting weights. He did not get much acting work growing up, so very little gave him self-gratification besides bodybuilding and women. "I told myself that if I'm not a movie star by eighteen, I'll quit and get a job. Then I said it again when I was twenty-one, and again at twenty-four: 'I won't be like these poor people chasing a dream of happiness that don't come true,'" Vin said. "I danced on street corners for money," he continued, "bought clothes and kept the tags attached so I could get cash back to pay rent. But during all the years I was broke, sleeping on someone's couch, I knew I'd be a movie star. No one else believed it, but I was going to break the mold."

Vin supported himself for nine years in New York City working as a bouncer. He changed his name to Vin Diesel while working at the popular nightclub Tunnel. Vin is short for Vincent and Diesel was the nickname given to him by his friends who said he ran off of diesel fuel, referring to his nonstop energy. At the same time, Vin was enrolled as an English major at Hunter College, but dropped out after three years to move to Los Angeles, California to further his acting career. He was twenty-four years old.

After two years of struggling to find acting work and even to find an agent, Vin returned to New York. His mother gave him the book Feature Films at Used Car Prices by Rick Schmidt, which ultimately showed Vin that he could take control of his career and make his own movies. Inspired, Vin created his own film, Multi-Facial (1995), a twenty-minute short about a racially-indeterminate actor who cannot land a job because of ethnic stereotyping, which he wrote in five days and filmed in less than three days with a budget of only $3,000. Later that year, Multi-Facial (1995) became a hit at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival, and people finally started to recognize Vin as an actor. The film was also noticed by filmmaker Steven Spielberg.

After the festival, Vin returned to Los Angeles and raised $50,000 through his telemarketing job of selling tools to fund the making of his first feature film, Strays (1997). He had written the manuscript for Strays (1997) prior to Multi-Facial (1995), but couldn't afford to film it at the time. As Vin once said, "So what successful people know and what I learned was, if you can't do it all, do what you can," explaining his reasoning for filming Multi-Facial (1995) prior to Strays (1997). To kick the film off the ground, Vin surrounded himself with a team of people who believed in him. He rehearsed with his fellow actors on the subway, in a way that everyone around them would think they were having a real conversation. Vin also encouraged the actors to shine with him in his scenes because doing so would only make the film stronger. Filming was a struggle. Vin had to fire the director of photography (DP) on the first day. After a week, he could no longer afford catering, so Vin made big pots of pasta and French bread for everyone. He also ran out of money at one point, and had to change the movie script to complete filming the following day.

Strays (1997) was accepted into the 1997 Sundance Film Festival, and although it received a good reputation, it didn't sell as well as he had hoped. Yet again, Vin returned to New York disappointed, only this time to receive a dream phone call. Steven Spielberg was impressed by Multi-Facial (1995) and wanted to meet Vin, eventually casting him in Saving Private Ryan (1998), starring Tom Hanks. The film was a huge success, grossing $481 million in the box office worldwide. Multi-Facial (1995) earned Vin even more work, when the director for The Iron Giant (1999) saw it and decided to cast Vin for the title role. Vin's acting career took off, and he starred in Boiler Room (2000), Pitch Black (2000), and the film that catapulted him into stardom, The Fast and the Furious (2001).