Talented actor, writer, and director Benjamin Geza Affleck (1972-) was born on this day in Berkeley, California and grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Affleck won the Academy Award for writing the screenplay for Good Will Hunting (1997) with co-star and best friend Matt Damon.

"A little over whelming for two guys who never even won a raffle," Affleck joked.

"It's not like we're the Wonder Twins or anything." Affleck added about the successful relationship." We were just lucky enough to want to do the same thing."

To help amateur screenwriters, Affleck and Damon, along with producer Chris Moore, created Project Greenlight in 2000, an online screenwriting competition, with the winner "greenlighting" a Miramax movie with a $1 million budget and 13-part "making of" special on HBO.

For the hot and handsome Affleck, his eclectic film resume has included: Armageddon (w/ Bruce Willis, Billy Bob Thornton), Shakespeare in Love, and Dogma (w/Alanis Morissette, Chris Rock). And that was just 1999!

A 1999 Cosmopolitan online poll named him "the star women most want to undress." People magazine named him one of "50 Most Beautiful People in the World" in 2000. He traded a high-profile relationship with Jennifer Lopez for marriage with Jennifer Garner in 2005.

About fame, he said philosophically, "I've finally learnt how to say: 'No comment.' To appear in the tabloids is a real learning curve and a steep one at that. You had better learn quick or you get burnt."

With a passion for Red Sox baseball, politics, and poker, the self-deprecating star has tried not to let things go to his head: "Professional acting is such a tenuous game, so flighty and fickle. You can feel like a pro one minute and be unemployed the next."

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