Inspiration compilation storybook part 6 Tyler Perry

Tyler Perry

Emmitt Perry was a mean father to have. Tyler Perry was born in 1969 and learned fast that his father, a carpenter, had a stock answer to everything – if he didn't like what you were doing, he'd "beat it out of you." Living with a man like that was difficult at best – to the point where Tyler twice attempted suicide to remove himself from his father’s influence. So desperate was he to escape his father's influence, that at the age of 16 he legally changed his name from Emmitt Perry Jr. to Tyler Perry, to distance himself from the man.

But his father wasn’t the only one to hurt young Tyler. Four people had molested him before the age of 10, and he later discovered that at this time, his father had molested his friend. It was with some relief that he found out years later Emmitt Sr. was not his biological father.

Though he did not complete high school, Tyler did earn a GED credit. But it was hard to find direction in his life after such a rough beginning. In his 20s, he was still adrift and looking for something to hold on to after suffering his childhood trauma. An episode of Oprah Winfrey influenced him greatly when a guest of the show described the therapeutic catharsis that writing can have on the soul. Thinking that writing sounded like good therapy, Tyler took up writing as a career and began a series of letters to himself that eventually became I know I’ve Been Changed.

In 1992, while living in Atlanta, Tyler put his life savings, $12,000.00 into producing the play. It bombed. The first run of the musical ran one weekend to a total of 32 audience members. Tyler didn’t give up though. For the next six years, he rewrote and re-tooled the play, to a continued series of failures. He kept working odd jobs, sleeping in his car, homeless, and still working on the production.

The seventh run hit a chord with audiences and slowly began gaining a cult audience. Since then Forbes magazine estimates that he’d sold more than $100 million in tickets, $30 million in recordings of the show and another $20 million in related merchandising.

From there, Tyler raised $5.5 million to finance a movie: Diary of a Mad Black Woman. That movie made a profit of nearly $50 Million. Afterward, he went on to create many more and his character, Madea, has become an iconic comic staple of movies.

It took stamina and a belief in his dreams and a certain amount of stubbornness to go from an abused kid to the man Forbes called the highest-earning man in the entertainment industry in 2011. Tyler Perry is an example of someone who was able to take the rough circumstances of his origins and turn his entire life around to fulfil his dreams beyond his wildest expectations.

The coolest thing?

Tyler has never forgotten what it is to struggle, and he’s still known today for being incredibly generous to those in need.