John Waters

John Waters Biography

John Samuel Waters Jr., born April 22, 1946, in Baltimore, Maryland, is an American filmmaker, actor, writer, and artist whose work grew out of the city and suburbs where he was raised. One of four children of Patricia Ann Whitaker and John Samuel Waters, a manufacturer of fire-protection equipment, he grew up in Lutherville, Maryland, near Baltimore. His boyhood friend Glenn Milstead, later known as Divine, also lived there, and the two would become closely linked in film history.

Waters first came to fame in the early 1970s with transgressive cult films that pushed against conventional propriety and censorship. Multiple Maniacs appeared in 1970, followed by Pink Flamingos in 1972 and Female Trouble in 1974. With Desperate Living in 1977, these works helped define the outrageous early style he called the Trash Trilogy. Shot in the Baltimore area with his company of local actors, the Dreamlanders, the films gave Divine some of his defining screen roles and included collaborators such as Mink Stole, Cookie Mueller, Edith Massey, David Lochary, Mary Vivian Pearce, Susan Walsh, and others.

His later career moved toward a wider public while keeping elements of post-modern comedy and surrealism. In 1981, Polyester starred Divine opposite former teen idol Tab Hunter. Waters wrote and directed Hairspray in 1988, a comedy film later adapted into a hit Broadway musical and then a 2007 musical film. Other films include Cry-Baby (1990), Serial Mom (1994), Pecker (1998), Cecil B. Demented (2000), and A Dirty Shame (2004), his last film so far. Cry-Baby also became a Broadway musical.

Several early experiences shaped Waters’s taste for the forbidden, the comic, and the bizarre. At seven, he was stirred by the film Lili and began staging violent versions of Punch and Judy for children’s birthday parties. He later connected Cry-Baby to childhood memories of “drapes,” news coverage of the murder of Carolyn Wasilewski, and his admiration for a young man across the street who had a hot rod. He was educated at the Calvert School, Towson Jr. High School, Calvert Hall College High School, and Boys’ Latin School of Maryland. As a teenager, he made frequent trips into downtown Baltimore to Martick’s, a beatnik bar, where he and Milstead met future film collaborators.

Waters has said that The Wizard of Oz opened him up to villainy, screenwriting, costumes, and dialogue. He has also said he takes equal joy and influence from highbrow art films and sleazy exploitation films, a view summed up in his line, “To understand bad taste one must have very good taste.” Beyond directing, he has acted in films including Sweet and Lowdown, Seed of Chucky, Mangus!, Excision, and Suburban Gothic, and appeared in the television series Chucky in 2024. He hosted and produced John Waters Presents Movies That Will Corrupt You in 2006, works in installations, photography, and sculpture, received two Grammy nominations for spoken word audiobooks, was named an officer of the French Order of Arts and Letters in 2018, and received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2023. His words still carry because they come from a clear eye for taste, trouble, comedy, and the parts of culture many people are taught not to notice.