Who’s Ben Stein?

Ben Stein is a television and movie actor, a lawyer, an author, a journalist, a professor, a game show host – and an adoptive father. According to Stein, the last of these is the most important and the most rewarding.

Stein was born in 1944 in Washington, D.C. His father was economist and writer Herb Stein. He grew up and attended high school in the DC suburb of Silver Springs, MD, graduated from Columbia University in 1966 with honors in economics and from Yale Law School in 1970 as valedictorian of his class (by election of his classmates). His wife, Alexandra Denman, is also a lawyer.

After graduation from law school, Stein was a poverty lawyer in New Haven and Washington, D.C. and a trial lawyer in the field of trade regulation at the Federal Trade Commission in Washington, D.C. He has been an adjunct professor at a number of different schools, most recently at Pepperdine Law School where he has taught in the fields of libel law, securities law, and ethics.

In the early 70’s, Stein was a speechwriter for President’s Nixon and Ford. He has been a columnist and editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal, a syndicated columnist for The Los Angeles Herald Examiner and a frequent contributor to Barron, where his articles about the ethics of management buyouts and issues of fraud in the Milken Drexel junk bond scheme drew major national attention. He has been a regular columnist for Los Angeles Magazine, New York Magazine, E! Online and has written a lengthy diary for ten years for The American Spectator. He also writes frequent op-ed. pieces for the The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal.

Stein has authored and published fifteen books; seven novels, largely about life in Los Angeles, and eight nonfiction books, about ethical and social issue in finance and about the political and social content of mass culture. In addition Stein is a screenwriter and was one of the creators of the television comedy Fernwood Tonight. His most recent book is "Tommy & Me: The Making of a Dad" – the story of how his life changed with the adoption of his son Tommy relatively late in life.

Stein is probably best known for his more than 60 different roles in television programs and movies. His rendition of the boring teacher in Ferris Bueller's Day Off was recently ranked as one of the fifty most famous scenes in American film. Since July of 1997, he has been the host of Comedy Central’s Emmy award winning quiz show, Win Ben Stein's Money.

Ben Stein, shown here on the set of "Win Ben Stein’s Money."