Biography for
John Belushi
Birth name
John Adam Belushi
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Height
5' 81⁄2" (1.74 m)
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Mini biography
The son of an Albanian immigrant restaurant owner, Adam Belushi, and
his vivacious wife, Agnes, John Belushi was born in Chicago, Illinois,
USA, on January 24, 1949. He grew up in Wheaton, where the family
moved when he was six. Though a young hellion in grade school, John
became the perfect all-American boy during his high school years where
he was co-captain of the Wheaton Central High School football team
and was elected homecoming king his senior year. He also developed
an interest in acting and appeared in the high school variety show.
Encouraged by his drama teacher, John decided to put aside his plans
to become a football coach to pursue a career in acting. After graduation
in 1967, John performed in summer stock in rural Indiana in a variety
of roles from Cardinal Wolsey in Anne of a Thousand Days to a comic
detective in Ten Little Indians. In the fall of his freshman year
at the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater, John changed his image
into a bad-boy appearance by growing his hair long and began to have
problems with discipline and structure of attending classes. Dropping
out of Wisconsin, John spent the next two years at the College of
DuPage, a junior college a few miles from his parents' Wheaton home,
where his father began persuading him to become a partner in his restaurant,
but John still preferred acting. While attending DuPage, John helped
found the West Compass Players, an improv comedy troupe patterned
after Chicago's famous Second City ensemble. In 1971, John made the
leap to Second City itself where he performed in various on-stage
comic performances with others who included Harold Ramis and Joe Flaherty.
John loved his life at Second City where he performed six nights a
week, perfecting the physical "gonzo" style of comedy he
later made famous. A year later, John and his live-in girlfriend from
his high school years, Judy Jacklin, moved to New York because John
had joined the cast of National Lampoon's Lemmings, an off-Broadway
rock musical revue that was originally booked for a six-week run but
played to full crowds for nearly 10 months. In 1973, John was hired
as a writer for the syndicated National Lampoon's Radio Hour which
became the National Lampoon Show in 1975. John's big break came that
same year when he joined the ground-breaking TV variety series Saturday
Night Live which made him a star. The unpredictable, aggressively
physical style of humor that he began on Second City flowered on SNL.
In 1978, while still working at Saturday Night Live, John appeared
in the movie Goin' South which starred and was directed by Jack Nicholson.
It was here that director John Landis noticed John and decided to
cast him in his movie National Lampoon's Animal House. John's minor
role as the notorious, beer-swilling Bluto made it a box-office smash
and the year's top grossing comedy. Despite appearing in only a dozen
scenes, John's performance stole the movie, which portrays college
fraternity shenanigans at a small college set in the year 1962. In
1979, John along with fellow SNL regular Dan Aykroyd quit the series
to pursue movie projects. John and Dan Aykroyd appeared in minor roles
in Steven Spielberg's financially unsuccessful 1941 and the following
year in John Landis' The Blues Brothers. Around this time, John's
drug use began escalating. Cocaine, which was ubiquitous in show-business
circles in the 1970's, became his drug of choice and he almost immediately
became addicted to it. His frequent cocaine sniffing binges became
a source of friction between him and Judy, whom he married in 1976.
John's love for blues and soul music inspired the Blues Brothers.
He and Aykroyd first appeared as Joliet Jake and Elwood Blues, a pair
of white soul men dressed in black suits, skinny ties, fedora hats
and Rayban sunglasses, as a warm-up act before the telecasts of Saturday
Night Live. Building on the success of their acts and the release
of their album "A Briefcase Full of Blues" John and Dan
Aykroyd starred in the movie, which gave John a chance to act with
his favorite musical heros including Ray Charles, James Brown and
Aretha Franklin. Although John's reputation for being an off-screen
party animal is legendary, his generous side is less well known. Using
some of his money, be bought his father a ranch outside San Diego,
help set up some of his Chicago friends with their own businesses
and even helped his younger brother Jim Belushi, who followed his
path to both Second City and Saturday Night Live. In 1981, John appeared
in the movie Continental Divide playing a hard-nosed Chicago newspaperman
who finds romance in Colorado with eagle expert Blair Brown. That
same year John and Dan Aykroyd appeared again in the movie Neighbors
which gave them a chance to reverse roles, with John playing a straight-arrow
family man whose life is turned upside down when a wild family man
(Aykroyd) moves in next door. In January 1982, John began work on
the screenplay for another movie, Noble Rot. Also, John had checked
into a bungalow at the Chateau Marmont, a popular celebrity hotel
in Los Angeles. John's drug use had been steadly increasing for over
a year now, which alarmed his wife and friends, but he continued to
promise Judy that he would quit someday. On March 5, 1982, John Belushi
was found dead in his hotel room at the age of 33. The local coroner
gave the cause of death as a lethal injection of cocaine and heroin.
Several years later, John's drug dealing/drug user companion during
his final weeks, Cathy Smith, was tried and sentenced to three years
in prison for supplying John with the drugs. Close friend James Taylor
sang "That Lonesome Road" at a memorial service at Martha's
Vineyard cemetery where John was buried.
