Stephen Michael Shearer was born in Illinois to retired Navy Chief Petty Officer Robert Dean Sypult and Billie Melba Fuller, a Registered Nurse. He has two older sisters, and a younger brother. He was raised in Illinois, Michigan, and Arkansas.At the age of 10 he began reading film biographies, his favorite author being Gerold Frank. At 11 he wrote his first screenplay Hellen and Ellen in the Wilderness and dreamt of becoming a film actor. As a child he appeared on local radio and appeared in numerous school plays to overcome his innate shyness.As a teenager, he was assistant editor of high school paper, penning numerous columns. He was awarded a three-year honorary scholarship from Missouri Southern State University in Joplin, Missouri, and was a film director, public service coordinator, and host of an afternoon TV show "The Movies" for a local CBS-affiliate. At university he majored in vocal and instrumental music, minored in psychology performing proficiently on string bass, cello, concert tuba, French horn, baritone, piano, and percussion. His major was voice (tenor-baritone). He was drum major for the marching band, member of Kappa Kappa Psi, and did post-graduate work in theatre arts, where he performed in numerous plays and wrote/produced/directed the University's first film production Sylvia and Sally of the Sand Dunes. He graduated with a BSE in Music.After college, and changing his name to Stephen Michael Shearer, he did live and print modeling extensively in Minneapolis, Tulsa, Dallas, and New York. He did extra and under-five work in numerous films and television shows such as Split Image (1982), Handgun (1982), The Cotton Club (1984), and various episodes of "Dallas" (1981-82), and "Central Park West" (1995). Over the years he starred in numerous community and off-Broadway theatrical productions, such as Luigi Januzzi's "The Appointment," which won the Samuel French Award in 1994. While employed in corporate America from 1988 until 2007, as head of diversity for a major corporation in Manhattan, he lost 11 colleagues in the collapse of Tower One of the World Trade Center on 9/11.Shifting gears, he began a career writing film history and biography. In his younger years he had film book and film reviews published in national publications, and had contributed research to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences Library. His close friend, actress Patricia Neal was his muse, and his definitive biography "Patricia Neal - An Unquiet Life" (University Press of Kentucky, 2006) won popular critical reviews. Since then he has written two more biographies, "Beautiful - The Life of Hedy Lamarr" (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's Press-Macmillan, 2010) and "Gloria Swanson - The Ultimate Star" (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's Press-Macmillan, 2013), an unpublished novel "September - A Passion," numerous film history articles, and a series of "Legendary Las Vegas Headliners" for the Las Vegas Review Journal.As a film historian he has appeared in numerous television and feature film documentaries, and as an actor he co-starred with Patricia Neal in her last film Flying By (2009). Show less «