He doesn't look anywhere close to 33. Heart-throb Brad Pitt has retained his blue-eyed boy look even as he has ascended the steps to superstardom in a few short years. When he first arrived in Hollywood he was a penniless novice. He had been used to earning $3.50 an hour as a bus boy, so he thought it was great when he started out by earning $9 an hour. Unfortunately the job involved dressing up in a chicken costume and standing on a street corner to advertise a restaurant. But he didn't mind, since people were laughing at the chicken, not at him.

William Bradley Pitt grew up in Springfield, Missouri, which can basically be described as the middle of nowhere or the back of beyond, or some such descriptive phrase. What it meant, though, was that for young Brad to venture out to try and make it in the world of glamour was a very big step indeed. He was 22 when he packed up his bags, put them in his Datsun, and hit the road to California. The three days it took him to drive there has been described by him as the most exciting time of his life, as he zipped along listening to Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix, and stopping over to see the Grand Canyon.

Though he had intended to do a degree in Art Direction, he never really finished it. He decided that his real talents lay in acting. At which point he took up any and every acting job that came his way. From playing a waiter in an obscure Charlie Sheen movie and standing in doorways, he slowly graduated to appearing in soaps and TV series. He even appeared in three episodes of Dallas for a grand total of about four minutes.

Meanwhile he made money on the side by driving strippers from job to job. He would drive them to the venue, introduce them to the audience, start the music, and then catch the clothes as the strippers threw them off so that none of the audience would steal them.

Then all of a sudden, he landed the role of a lifetime. Thelma and Louise turned his career around and shot him into the spotlight. Brad Pitt became famous for being the guy who gave Geena Davis the "$6,000 orgasm". Just the fact that he had been in the movie was enough to land him other offers. Even before Thelma and Louise was released he had already completed shooting for Johnny Suede and Cool World and was in the process of filming for A River Runs Through It with Robert Redford. When Thelma and Louise was released it proved to be a hit not only with audiences but also with critics.

The next highlight of Brad Pitt's career came in the form of the tough True Romance in which he did a cameo of an aimless junkie. It did not go unnoticed. In recent years high profile movies like Interview With the Vampire (co-starring Tom Cruise), Legend of the Fall (co-starring Anthony Hopkins), The Devil's Own (co-starring Harrison Ford) and Seven (co-starring Morgan Freeman), have followed in quick succession. Audiences will be able to see the dewy-eyed heart-throb next in the lead role in the exotic Seven Years in Tibet directed by Jean Jacques Annaud. It is based on the memoirs of the famous Austrian mountain climber, Heinrich Harrer, who escaped from an Allied prison camp in India during World War II, conned his way into Tibet, and ended up tutoring the young Dalai Lama.