How To Become A Hollywood Movie Star

Becoming a Hollywood movie star is the dream that inspires most aspiring actors and actresses to start their acting careers. However, most successful actors and actresses have also had at least some kind of professional acting training.

Becoming a movie star is an endeavor that requires an incredible amount of talent, and those who practice their craft and learn what they need to know from good sources have a real chance at movie and TV stardom.

Some aspiring movie stars are able to make their acting dream come true. Others never quite get there, either leaving the dream behind, or chasing it forever.

A lot of people think that becoming a movie star is something that happens by luck or that they have to get discovered, but the reality is that most movie star actors simply had their skills focussed by a professional acting coach to bring out their maximum potential.

The aspiring actors and actresses who read about acting and study in acting classes are the ones who end up in movies, and they're the ones who get a real chance at becoming Hollywood movie stars.

Take Brad Pitt, for example.

Before Brad Pitt moved to Los Angeles, he had virtually no acting experience and zero training. He had performed in a few musicals in high school and acted in several of his fraternity's plays in college, but he had never taken an acting class or studied with an acting coach before.

Naturally, once he dropped out of school and moved to L.A., he struggled to get parts.

Brad moved into an apartment in North Hollywood, where he lived with eight other guys. They had no furniture and no beds to sleep in - just a sleeping bag for each of them, a TV, a stereo, and a toaster oven.

To earn money, Brad would do odd jobs at a place called the Job Factory, where people could hire day laborers. His work included moving refrigerators, selling cigarettes, and once, he had to dress up as a giant chicken for El Pollo Loco, and stand out on Sunset Blvd in 100° weather.

One of the jobs that he got was driving strippers around to bachelor parties. On his last day of work before he quit, he met a girl who told him about an acting class with a man named Roy London.

Brad studied with London for years before he was able to land a talent agent. And even then, after failing to book his first audition, which was for a small part in Jodie Foster's movie, The Accused, his agent suggested that he take more acting classes.

He later studied with famed acting coaches Ivana Chubbuck and Margie Haber, and eventually started booking small roles on TV shows like "Head of the Class", "Growing Pains", "Another World", and "Dallas". However, as you'll soon learn, TV work does not lead to movie stardom.

In 1990, he was cast in a now iconic Levi's commercial, and soon afterwards, he got an audition for a movie called Thelma & Louise. From the success of that, he got the lead in his first big hit, A River Runs Through It.

With the credit of headlining a major studio film on his acting résumé, Brad Pitt's Salary sky-rocketed from $6,000, which he was paid for Thelma & Louise, to $500,000, which he was paid for Kalifornia, a film that was released 11 months after the huge success of A River Runs Through It.

He continued to reinvest his success in movies with the capacity for greatness, and in 1994, he played the lead role opposite Tom Cruise in Interview With The Vampire, which turned out to be the first blockbuster of his career.

The result? More movie offers, and a pay increase to $4 million, which he was paid the following year for the movie Se7en. And when that movie opened huge, he was upgraded to $10 million a picture, and was solidified as a true Hollywood movie star.