Celebrity Birthday of the Day

Happy Birthday, Gary Busey! 

Full-time crazy person and part-time actor Gary Busey was born in Goose Creek, Texas in 1944, the son of a homemaker and a construction designer who claimed they were descendants of Martian colonists who had settled on Earth in the 1830s (OK, not really. But admit it, you thought it was possible). 

While on football scholarship to perennial powerhouse Pittsburgh State in Pittsburgh, Kansas, Busey became interested in acting, eventually transferring to perennial acting powerhouse Oklahoma State (motto: You Really Must Be Desperate). 

After finding work on television (including being the last person ever killed on Gunsmoke -- episode 300,000), Busey's big break came when, despite looking nothing like him, he landed the part of Buddy Holly in (you guessed it) The Buddy Holly Story (1978). 

Pictured: not Gary Busey

The movie garnered Busey an Academy Award nomination, and was followed by drug abuse (including famously snorting coke off his dog) and a string of fairly uninterrupted shit. The next movie he was in that anybody's heard of was 1987's Lethal Weapon, where, cast hilariously not against type, Busey played a crazy drug person who lights his wrist on fire for fun. 

Shortly after this performance, Busey was nearly killed after crashing his motorcycle. Failing to listen to what his mother had told him a thousand times, Busey wasn't wearing a helmet and smacked his skull on a curb. The resulting hole was about the size of a half dollar, but instead of letting the little demons and creatures crawling around in there out, the injury only made things worse, leading to brain damage and a complete loss of impulse control (a particularly bad condition to have when you're, you know, Gary Busey).  

Shocking, isn't it? He actually made me feel bad for Ryan Seacrest. I didn't think that was possible. 

Anyhow, Busey has somehow continued his pathetic career on the strength of his immense oddness. These days, he'll act in almost anything, from a part as a Jewish-American doctor who harvests organs to sell to rich patients in the Turkish film Valley of the Wolves Iraq, to supplying the voice to the titular character of  The Gingerdead Man, a hilariously bad 2005 horror movie where a psychopathic killer's blood is somehow dumped into a gingerbread mix, rendering the resulting gingerbread man (you guessed it) a psychopathic killer. 

The final battle is one of the most awesomely bad things ever. 

So Happy Birthday, Gary. I, for one, hope to never meet you.