Kevin Hart American Comedian From the United States

Early life

Kevin Darnell Hart was born on 6 July 1979 in Philadelphia. He grew up in a single-parent household with his mother, who worked for the University of Pennsylvania, and he has an older brother, Robert. As a teenager he hoped to become a basketball player and took part in the La Salle basketball camp. After graduating from George Washington High School he spent a short time at the Community College of Philadelphia, left, and moved to New York City, where he worked for a while as a shoe salesman.

Career

Hart's first stand-up set took place at the Laff House in Philadelphia under the name Lil Kev, and the early years of his career were slow. He started entering comedy competitions in Massachusetts, where audience reactions gradually improved, and he moved away from imitating other comedians such as Chris Tucker toward material about his own insecurities and experiences. His first breakthrough came when Judd Apatow cast him in a recurring role in the series Undeclared (2001).

His stand-up albums are I'm a Grown Little Man (2009), Seriously Funny (2010), Laugh at My Pain (2011), Let Me Explain (2013) and What Now? (2016). Laugh at My Pain and Let Me Explain were also released as films in cinemas, and he is credited as writer on several of the specials. The What Now? tour ran from April 2015 to August 2016, and the film of that show was shot before 53,000 people at Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia. Hart released a mixtape under the alias Chocolate Droppa to accompany it.

His film work includes Paper Soldiers (2002), Scary Movie 3 (2003), The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005), Little Fockers (2010), The Five-Year Engagement (2012), Grudge Match (2013) and This Is the End (2013). In 2013 he co-created Real Husbands of Hollywood with Chris Spencer. Ride Along (2014) and its 2016 sequel paired him with Ice Cube, and Central Intelligence (2016) paired him with Dwayne Johnson, who also appears in the Jumanji films. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017) is his highest-grossing title in the records here, at 962 million dollars worldwide. He voiced Snowball in The Secret Life of Pets and its 2019 sequel, appeared in Hobbs & Shaw and Jumanji: The Next Level in 2019, and played the lead in the drama The Upside. Later credits include The Man from Toronto (2022) and Borderlands (2024), in which he plays Roland. His screen credits number fifty-eight from 1988 to 2026.

As a producer he made Night School (2018) under his company HartBeat Productions. In 2017 he launched Laugh Out Loud, a media company that he later came to own a majority of. He has hosted the 2011 BET Awards, the 2012 MTV Video Music Awards and three episodes of Saturday Night Live, and in 2024 he hosted the Netflix special The Roast of Tom Brady. In December 2018 he was announced as host of the 2019 Academy Awards, then stepped back from the role.

Recognition

Hart has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He received the MTV Comedic Genius Award in 2015, and in the same year Time magazine put him on its list of the 100 most influential people. In 2024 he was given the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. He has also been nominated for two Grammy Awards and four Primetime Emmy Awards.

Personal life

Hart married Torrei Hart in 2003, and they divorced in 2011. He married Eniko Parrish near Santa Barbara, California, on 13 August 2016. He is a practising Christian, and he has played poker for years, serving as a brand ambassador for PokerStars from 2017.