Known For: American filmmaker, actor, comedian, writer, and artist (born 1946)
Category: Actors
Occupation: television actor, film actor, film director, screenwriter, film producer, actor, film editor, journalist, visual artist, voice actor, art collector, drawer, cinematographer, photographer, sculptor, installation artist, filmmaker, director, author
Country: United States of America
City: Baltimore
Date of Birth: Monday, 22 April 1946
Language English
John Samuel Waters Jr. is an American filmmaker, writer, actor, and artist. He rose to fame in the early 1970s for his transgressive cult films, including Multiple Maniacs (1970), Pink Flamingos (1972) and Female Trouble (1974). Waters wrote and directed the comedy film Hairspray (1988), which was later adapted into a hit Broadway musical and a 2007 musical film. Other films he has written and directed include Desperate Living (1977), Polyester (1981), Cry-Baby (1990), Serial Mom (1994), Pecker (1998), and Cecil B. Demented (2000). His films contain elements of post-modern comedy and surrealism.
| BirthPlace | Baltimore |
| Education | Q4123080, Q5024252, Q4952608, Q49210 |
| Awards | Q13452524, Q5513593 |
| Wikipedia | John_Waters |
Waters was born on April 22, 1946, in Baltimore, Maryland, one of four children born to Patricia Ann (née Whitaker) and John Samuel Waters, a manufacturer of fire-protection equipment. He was raised Catholic by his mother, though his father was not Catholic. Through his mother, who immigrated to the United States from Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, as a child, he is the great-great-great-grandson of George P. Whitaker of the Whitaker iron family. Waters grew up in Lutherville, Maryland, a suburb of Baltimore. His boyhood friend and muse, Glenn Milstead, later known as Divine, also lived in Lutherville. Waters lived at 313 Morris Avenue in Lutherville from his early teenage years until he moved out in his early twenties. Waters and Milstead shot many of their early films at the house, dubbing the front lawn the "Dreamland Lot". The film Lili inspired an interest in puppets in the seven-year-old Waters, who proceeded to stage violent versions of Punch and Judy for children's birthday parties. Biographer Robrt L. Pela says that Waters's mother believes the puppets in Lili had the greatest influence on Waters's subsequent career (though Pela believes tacky films at a local drive-in, which the young Waters watched from a distance through binoculars, had a greater effect). Cry-Baby was also a product of Waters's boyhood, because of his fascination as a seven-year-old with the "drapes" then receiving intense news coverage because of the murder of Carolyn Wasilewski, a young "drapette", and his admiration for a young man living across the street who had a hot rod. Waters was privately educated at the Calvert School in Baltimore. After attending Towson Jr. High School in nearby Towson, and Calvert Hall College High School, he graduated from Boys' Latin School of Maryland. While still a teen, he made frequent trips into downtown Baltimore to visit Martick's, a beatnik bar, where he and Milstead met many of their later film collaborators. He was underage and could not enter the bar proper, but loitered in the adjacent alley, where he relied on older patrons to slip him drinks.
