David Lawrence Schwimmer was born on November 2, 1966, in Queens, New York, to Jewish parents, attorneys Arthur and Arlene Colman Schwimmer. He was raised in Los Angeles where he attended the famed Beverly Hills High School. He considered on following the footsteps of his parents and enrolled in Chicago's Northwestern University to pursue law but was bitten by an acting bug and embraced it. At the age of 10, he had his first experiences of acting when he was cast in a Jewish version of “Cinderella”. In 1979, Schwimmer went to a Shakespeare workshop given by English actor Ian McKellen in Los Angeles. He also joined a contest in the Southern California Shakespeare Festival three years in a row, winning two first prizes. Following graduation from Northwestern, Schwimmer gained enough stage experience in Chicago theatre to co-found the Lookingglass Theatre Company with fellow actors. He remains passionate about his involvement with the troupe and has starred in or directed many of their productions.
Schwimmer made the first of several attempts to break into Hollywood, when he was cast as a killer in the made-for-TV thriller A Deadly Silence in 1989. He then appeared in a number of television roles, including L.A. Law, The Wonder Years, NYPD Blue, and Monty in the early 1990s. Schwimmer received his breakthrough role in 1994 when he was cast as Ross Geller in NBC's situation comedy Friends, a series that revolved around a group of friends who live together in Manhattan, New York City. He played a hopeless-romantic paleontologist who works at a museum and later becomes a professor at a university His first leading film role was in The Pallbearer (1996), which was followed by roles in Kissing a Fool (1998), Six Days Seven Nights (1998), Apt Pupil, and Picking Up the Pieces (2000). He was then cast in the miniseries Band of Brothers (2001) as Herbert Sobel.
Following the series finale of Friends in 2004, Schwimmer was cast as the titular character in the 2005 drama Duane Hopwood. Other film roles include the computer animated film Madagascar (2005), the dark comedy Big Nothing (2006), the thriller Nothing But the Truth(2008), and Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa (2008). Schwimmer made his London stage debut in the leading role in Some Girl(s) in 2005. In 2006, he made his Broadway debut in The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial. Schwimmer made his feature film directorial debut with the 2007 comedyRun Fatboy Run. The following year he made his Off-Broadway directorial debut in the 2008 production Fault Lines.
