Chuck Lorre

Origins and early life

Charles Michael Levine, known as Chuck Lorre, was born on 18 October 1952 and grew up in Plainview, on Long Island, where his father, Robert, ran a luncheonette that did poorly and left the family short of money.

Work and career

Born into a Jewish family and given the Hebrew name Chaim, he went to Hebrew school as a boy, and in 2011, writing from Israel in one of the short texts he signs at the end of his shows, he described feeling surrounded for the first time in his life by people like himself and asked how Chaim had become Chuck and Levine had become Lorre. He left the State University of New York at Potsdam after two years to tour the country as a guitarist and songwriter, and wrote “French Kissin”, which Debbie Harry recorded on her 1986 album “Rockbird”.

In the 1980s he turned to television, writing for animated series and co-writing the music of the 1987 “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” series, before joining the writing staff of “Roseanne”. He went on to create or co-create “Grace Under Fire” in 1993, “Cybill” in 1995 and “Dharma & Greg” in 1997, then “Two and a Half Men” with Lee Aronsohn in 2003. With Bill Prady he created “The Big Bang Theory”, which ran on CBS from 2007 to 2019 and, at 279 episodes, became the longest-running multi-camera sitcom in television history.

He followed it with “Mom” in 2013, the prequel “Young Sheldon” in 2017 and, for Netflix, “The Kominsky Method”, which won the Golden Globe for best musical or comedy series in January 2019. Each of his episodes ends with a one-second vanity card, a page of his own writing that viewers pause to read, and the cards were gathered into a book in 2012.

Recognition

He received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on 12 March 2009, was inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame in 2012, and published a memoir, “Sitcom”, in October 2026.