Cooper is quite impressive as the kind of guy who comes across as a jerk until he has to
deliver as a friend

Students of acting are a dime a dozen, but those who actually go on to full-time or, for that matter, successful acting careers are a lot rarer. For any fan of the American cable TV talk show Inside the Actors Studio, Bradley Cooper, who is quickly joining the ranks of Hollywood A-listers, was a familiar face long before he made a movie or appeared in a TV series. He was a student at the Studio in the late 1990s, and reportedly "appears" in at least half a dozen of the series' programs, sitting in the audience and, in the case of the Sean Penn episode, asking questions.
Though many movie actors started out in TV first, in the 00s it became more than a rite of passage, and whatever the value of Cooper's minimal exposure on Actors Studio, he paid his dues fully on TV, even while appearing in small parts in mostly dumb movie comedies.

Because of his tall stature, classical build and conventional good looks, he could easily get roles as hunks, and, in fact his first paying gig was in a 1999 episode of Sex and the City as, naturally, a boy toy. The show's producer liked what he saw and then cast Cooper in five episodes of his short-lived series The $treet, which eventually lead to three seasons as Will Tippin in the espionage series Alias, at which point Cooper moved permanently to Los Angeles.

Bradley Cooper was born and raised in and around Philadelphia, the son of an Italian-American mother and an Irish-American father who worked as a stockbroker. Fluent in French, he graduated from Georgetown with a B.A. in English before enrolling at the Actors Studio, which is set up in New York's New School. In fact, he had to miss his graduation from the New School in order to appear in his first movie, Wet Hot American Summer, a cult comedy about a Jewish summer camp in 1981 that, for better or worse (better, it turns out) catapulted Cooper into the kind of frat house comedies that dominated the 00s.

This cottage industry didn't really kick into high gear for Cooper until he was cast in what many believe it the ultimate post-millennial frat-boy comedy, Wedding Crashers, starring the two most recognizable actors of the genre, Vince Vaughan and Owen Wilson. Cooper played the film's heavy, Zachary "Sack" Lodge, the sociopathic, macho, preppy boyfriend of Claire (Rachel McAdams), whom Owen Wilson's character is in love with. Cooper proved his range in the part, imbuing Sack with an air of deranged entitlement that was as scary as it was funny. In an interview at the time, Cooper told a reporter that "there were a lot of Sack Lodges at my high school." Must have been some high school.

Cooper was much more sympathetic as the slacker Demo in the 2006 romantic comedy Failure to Launch. The movie, however, was much less successful than Wedding Crashers and was resolutely panned by critics. He played a football player in the virtually unseen The Comebacks in 2007. Thank God for TV, because the movie parts were few and far between at this point, though he did land a major if dramatically insubstantial part in the Jim Carrey vehicle Yes Man.

2009 was Cooper's year, even if the output was mixed in terms of quality. In addition to a small part in the omnibus New York, I Love You, he was one of the many leads in He's Just Not That Into You, playing a married man who is tempted to cheat when he meets a young, seemingly available woman in a supermarket checkout line. He also made the horror movie Case 39 with Renee Zellweger, who he has reportedly been dating ever since, and horror (meaning horribly bad) comedy, All About Steve, opposite Sandra Bullock.

But the break that made Cooper a player was The Hangover, which, when it was first released, seemed like just another frat boy comedy, albeit without any big frat boy comedy stars. However, it went on to earn millions at the box office. Cooper plays Phil Wenneck, a cynical schoolteacher and fair weather misogynist (though he's married) who acts as the bad boy conscience of a trio of men who take their friend to Vegas for a bachelor party on the eve of his wedding and then promptly lose him. Cooper is quite impressive as the kind of guy who comes across as a jerk until he has to deliver as a friend.

That quality, a mixture of wiseguy sass and bedrock reliability, is exactly what the producers of The A-Team, the movie remake of the popular 1980s bonehead American action TV series, wanted when they were casting the role of the movie's token womanizer, Lt. Templeton "Faceman" Peck; that and ripping muscles and sparkling white teeth, both of which Cooper also possesses. If the movie becomes a series, Cooper has it made for the next decade, but it seems he's got plenty of other projects to look forward to, including a sequel to The Hangover, a co-starring role with Robert De Niro in the thriller The Dark Fields, and a co-starring role with Kate Winslet in the newest Susanne Bier romantic drama Which Brings Me to You.