Charlie Sheen Biography

Charlie Sheen is the mercurial former star of the long-running TV sitcom Two and a Half Men who announced in 2015 that he is HIV-positive. Charlie Sheen was raised in a show-business family: his father Martin Sheen starred in Apocalypse Now and later played President Josiah Bartlet in The West Wing.

After a few smaller roles in films like Red Dawn (1984, starring Patrick Swayze) and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986, starring Matthew Broderick), Charlie Sheen emerged as a leading man in the Oliver Stone films Platoon (1986, starring Willem Dafoe) and Wall Street (1987, starring Michael Douglas). After reaching stardom, though, Charlie Sheen’s appearances in the tabloids began to rival his appearances on the big screen; as played out in the gossip columns, Sheen’s life turned into a wild ride that included cocaine, high-priced prostitutes, an accidental shooting (in 1990 — his then-girlfriend, Kelly Preston, was wounded), a long, bitter divorce battle with actress Denise Richards, and an arrest on felony charges related to alleged domestic violence with his third wife, Brooke Mueller, in Aspen, Colorado on Christmas Day 2009.

All the while, Sheen kept working in hits and misses that included dramas such as Eight Men Out (1988, with David Strathairn) and The Arrival (1996), and lowbrow comedies such as Hot Shots (1991) and Scary Movie 3 (2003). Despite his much-publicized drug problem, Charlie Sheen made a comeback in the late 1990s, poking fun at himself in the film Being John Malkovich (1999, starring John Cusack) and replacing Michael J. Fox in the TV series Spin City. Sheen landed a major comedy series in 2003, co-starring with Jon Cryer in the sitcom Two and a Half Men, a hit that brought him Emmy nominations in 2006 and 2007. Sheen stayed with the show for eight successful and lucrative years, but was fired by the show’s producers on 7 March 2011 after he gave a series of bizarre interviews in which he announced “I am on a drug, it’s called Charlie Sheen” and insulted the show’s producers. He was replaced on the show by Ashton Kutcher.

Sheen’s erratic behavior (including a short-lived “Torpedo of Truth” national live tour) and his fondness for being seen with adult film stars kept him in the tabloids temporarily. After a few quiet years, he resurfaced in November of 2015 to announce that he was HIV-positive, and had been “for roughly four years.”