Actor, musician, and comedian Jack Black was born on August 28, 1969, in Santa Monica, California.
Black’s parents divorced when he was 10 years old, which deeply affected him. At 13, he appeared in a TV commercial for the Activision video game Pitfall! And this commercial was basically the first step in Black’s career,
“I knew that if my friends saw me on TV, it would be the answer to all my prayers. Because then they would have to worship me and everyone would know I was awesome. And I was awesome—for three days. Then it wore off. But it gave me the hunger,” Black said.
Black dropped out of university to pursue a career as an entertainer. In 1987 he joined a performance group called the Actors’ Gang, founded by Tim Robbins.
Through the Actors’ Gang, Black met Kyle Gass, and in 1994 they formed the comedy rock duo Tenacious D, debuting at Los Angeles’s Al’s Bar with their song Tribute.
Black and Gass went on to create the HBO comedy series Tenacious D, which ran for six 15-minute episodes from 1997 to 2000.
After several minor roles in various films and series, his breakout performance came in 2000 in the romantic comedy-drama High Fidelity. After his performance in High Fidelity, Black hit it big with School of Rock in 2003. The film, directed by Richard Linklater, was written for Black by actor and screenwriter Mike White, who was Black’s neighbor at the time.
I had the idea of Black leading a band of little kids; somehow it just seemed like a funny visual. Then I got the idea that it would be fun to have him be more of a W.C. Fields …, like a guy who isn’t really somebody you’d want around kids, but that’s part of the fun of it.” White said.
Black married Tanya Haden in 2006, and the couple has two sons. In 2018, Black started working with his son Samuel to create the YouTube channel Jablinski Games, focusing on “games, food, and life.” In 2025, the channel had almost five million subscribers.
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