- Born
- Birth nameTerence Patrick Winter
- Height5′ 8½″ (1.74 m)
- Terence Winter was born on October 2, 1960 in Brooklyn, New York, USA. He is a producer and writer, known for The Sopranos (1999), The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) and Boardwalk Empire (2010). He is married to Rachel Winter. They have two children.
- SpouseRachel Winter(? - present) (2 children)
- ChildrenChild
- Says he first realized that movies "could be art" when he saw Taxi Driver (1976) at age 16 years old. Quickly returned to see it another 10 times.
- Wrote 25 of the 86 The Sopranos (1999) episodes, while also producing almost every other episode. In the process, he won four EMMYs, including one for writing one of the series' most infamous and celebrated shows, "Pine Barrens". He also acted in three others (as "Terence Patrick Winter") and directed only one, in the final season.
- Studied journalism at New York University, then earned a law degree from St. John's University. He practiced law for two years in New York City before moving to Los Angeles, California in 1991 to pursue a screen-writing career. He eventually won a spot in the Warner Brothers Sitcom Writers Workshop, and later joined the writing staff of The Great Defender (1995), starring Michael Rispoli, later a cast member of The Sopranos (1999).
- While a law student in the mid-80s, he worked part-time as a legal assistant in Merrill Lynch's equity trading department, an experience which provided some background for his screenplay The Wolf of Wall Street (2013).
- Raised in Brooklyn's 'blue-collar' Marine Park neighborhood where, he says, 'being a writer is not the kind of thing that jumps out at you as a career path'.
- [as writer of The Sopranos (1999)] When Uncle Junior was diagnosed with cancer, people were calling me up, saying, 'Is he going to be okay?' I said, 'We're getting him the best doctors we can. Really, we're on it.'
- One FBI agent told us early on, that on Monday morning they would get to the FBI office and all the agents would talk about 'The Sopranos', having the same conversation about the show, but always from the flip side. We would hear back that real wiseguys used to think that we had somebody on the inside. They could'y believe how accurate the show was.
- [ The Sopranos (1999)] I watched eighteen different versions of the last scene of the series finale. All very subtle variations on each other, but that was so painstaking, shot by shot, and it took David [Chase] weeks I think to put that ending together. I thought it was great. What I always took away from it was: when you're Tony Soprano, even going out for ice cream with your family is going to be fraught with paranoia, and whether a guy comes out of the bathroom that night, eventually somebody's going to come out of the bathroom somewhere. Maybe it happened that night, maybe it didn't. But his legacy is paranoia and just that horrible distance that he lives in. I was shocked that people were so angry. It upset David that people would think, Oh, he's trying to fuck with us.
- [re actor Bobby Cannavale's work in role as Gyp in Boardwalk Empire (2010)] [It] had to be played at razor's edge. You're laughing at him but also terrified. I explained who Gyp was, Bobby came back as Gyp. There was not another conversation. Sometimes an actor works hard, and everyone knows it. Bobby was speaking Italian in a few scenes, and I said, 'I didn't know you spoke Italian,' and he said, 'I don't.' He learned it for the role, worked privately with his own dialogue coach. But he doesn't talk about it. I know only because I happened to ask.
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