Matthew Perry was born on August 19, 1969 in Williamstown, Massachusetts but raised in Ottawa, Ontario. He is the only child of Suzanne and John Perry, who were divorced when he was less than a year old. Perry's dad is known as the guy in the Old Spice commercials. Perry's mom is a former Canadian TV anchor and onetime press secretary for Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. Perry is a tennis-lover. He started at the age of 4. At 13, he was ranked as the No.2 player in Ottawa. Perry began acting in seventh grade when he played a gunslinger named Arriba Arriba Geneva in his Ashbury College production of a play called The Life and Death of Sneaky Fitch. At 15, Perry moved to L.A. to test his tennis and acting skills. He was prepared for his first big U.S. tennis match. Unfortunately, things didn't go well so Perry decided to pursue an acting career instead.

At 16, Perry got his first big break, as William Richert spotted Perry in a Los Angeles restaurant and asked him to audition for his movie, A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon (filmed in 1986; released 1988). Perry landed the role, which marked his first significant professional acting experience. Shortly after his graduation from high school, Perry landed the lead in a short-lived sitcom called Second Chance. After the show was cancelled after just one season in 1987-88, Perry began a series of guest appearances on more successful sitcoms, most notably Growing Pains. He also appeared in the 1989 film She’s Out of Control, starring Tony Danza, and had more significant roles in such TV movies as Dance ‘Til Dawn (1988), Call Me Anna (1990), Deadly Relations (1993), and the star-studded Parallel Lives (1994). In 1992, Perry starred in another doomed sitcom, Home Free, which again lasted only one season. In 1994, Perry and his longtime friend and writing partner Andrew Hill Newman pitched the pilot for a sitcom called Maxwell’s House, about a group of twenty something friends, to the NBC television network. The resilient Perry auditioned for the show, called simply Friends, and won the role of Chandler Bing, the terminally wisecracking member of the titular gang of six young New Yorkers. Perry’s first starring feature film role was in the disappointing romantic comedy Fools Rush In (1997), co-starring Salma Hayek. In 1998, he appeared with the late comedian Chris Farley in Almost Heroes, Farley’s last film. Perry’s next effort was another mediocre romantic comedy, Three to Tango (1999). He had more success parlaying his preppy smart-aleck shtick into the role of a suburban dentist in the hit comedy The Whole Nine Yards (2000), co-starring Bruce Willis as the mob hitman who moves in next door. In May 2003, Perry will make his professional stage debut in the West End revival of David Mamet's Sexual Perversity in Chicago.

In addition to his career highs and lows, Perry has also made headlines for his personal problems, including a 1997 stint in a rehab clinic after he became addicted to painkillers. In May 2000, Perry was again hospitalized, this time for a serious stomach ailment. Shortly after his release from the hospital, Perry was involved in a car accident in which he drove his Porsche into the porch of a Hollywood Hills home after reportedly swerving to avoid another car. In the spring of 2000, in the middle of filming Friends as well as his next big screen project, Servicing Sara, with Elizabeth Hurley, Perry was admitted to a rehabilitation clinic again, this time for undisclosed reasons. He returned briefly to the set of Friends to film the season's last two episodes, but the future of Servicing Sara remains in doubt while Perry is confined to rehab.

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