Paul Walker Biography

Blue-eyed hunk Paul Walker was Vin Diesel‘s co-star in the 2001 action movie The Fast and the Furious, and the two starred in multiple sequels together before Walker’s untimely death in a real-life car crash in 2013. An actor and model since childhood, Paul Walker worked steadily in television and film starting in his teen years, including a stint on the soap opera The Young and the Restless. In the late 1990s Walker was all over the place, appearing in Pleasantville (1998, starring Reese Witherspoon and Tobey Maguire), Varsity Blues (1999, with James Van Der Beek), She’s All That (1999, with Freddie Prinze, Jr.) and The Skulls (2000). With the box office success of The Fast and the Furious and its sequel 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003), Walker proved himself as a bankable leading man. He played a mobster in the creepy Running Scared (2006) and battled T.I. in the action movie Takers (2010, with Matt Dillon). But it was the Fast and Furious franchise that made his name, with Walker playing a rogue cop who starts a long-running entanglement with Diesel’s gang of hot-rod outlaws. He was in six of the films in all: The Fast and the Furious (2001), 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003), Fast & Furious (2009), Fast Five (2011) and Fast and Furious 6 (2013). He was already filming Furious 7 when he was killed as the passenger in a private one-car crash in Santa Clarita, north of Los Angeles, in 2013. He starred posthumously in the completed film, thanks to a blend of footage he’d already filmed, shots featuring his brothers Caleb and Cody as stand-ins, and special effects trickery.