About Maybe It's Time

Bradley Charles Cooper (born January 5, 1975) is an American actor and filmmaker. He has been nominated for many awards, including four Academy Awards, two BAFTA Awards, and two Golden Globes. Cooper appeared in Forbes Celebrity 100 on two occasions and Time's list of 100 most influential people in the world in 2015. His films have grossed $7.8 billion worldwide and he was named one of the world's highest-paid actors for three years.

Cooper was born in Philadelphia, and grew up in the nearby communities of Jenkintown and Rydal. His mother, Gloria (née Campano), worked for the local NBC affiliate. His father, Charles Cooper, worked as a stockbroker for Merrill Lynch. Cooper's father was of Irish descent, while mother is of Italian ancestry (from Abruzzo and Naples). He has an older sister, Holly, and was raised as a Roman Catholic. He had cholesteatoma in his ear soon after his birth, and punctured his eardrum when he started diving at an early age.

Describing himself as a child, Cooper has said: "I never lived the life of 'Oh, you're so good-looking'. People thought I was a girl when I was little, because I looked like a girl—maybe because my mother would keep my hair really long".He excelled at basketball, and enjoyed cooking: "I used to have buddies come over after kindergarten and I'd cook them food. I prided myself in taking whatever was in the fridge and turning it into lasagna."He initially wanted to attend a military academy and move to Japan to become a ninja. At an early age, his father introduced him to films like The Elephant Man, which inspired him to be an actor. Cooper says that his parents were initially apprehensive of his career choice, but they eventually changed their perceptions when they saw Cooper play the part of Joseph Merrick in an excerpt from the play The Elephant Man. While attending Germantown Academy, he worked at the Philadelphia Daily News. He says that in school he was neither "the smartest person" nor "the coolest kid" and "really didn't have anything going on!" After graduating from the academy in 1993, Cooper studied at Villanova University for a year before transferring to Georgetown University. Cooper graduated with honors from the latter with a Bachelor of Arts in English in 1997. He was a member of the Georgetown Hoyas rowing team and acted with Nomadic Theatre. Cooper became fluent in French at Georgetown and spent six months as an exchange student in Aix-en-Provence, France. In his television debut, Sex and the City in 1999, he made a brief appearance opposite Sarah Jessica Parker. Cooper later served as a presenter in the travel-adventure series Globe Trekker (2000), which took him to such places as Peru and Croatia. Cooper had been interested in a career in diplomacy when he auditioned for the master class graduate degree at the Actors Studio and was selected by James Lipton. In 2000, he received a Master of Fine Arts degree in acting from the Actors Studio Drama School at The New School in New York City. There, he trained with the coach Elizabeth Kemp of whom he says: "I was never able to relax in my life before her." She has since advised him on many of his films. While studying in New York City, Cooper worked as a doorman at the Morgans Hotel, and briefly interacted with Robert de Niro in a question and answer master class session, which was later featured in an episode of Inside the Actors Studio.