Ben Stiller On His Parents’ Showbiz Marriage

Public media is no longer federally funded, but the NPR network remains yours in service to and powered by you. Keep public media public with a donation today at donate.npr.org and thank you. This is Fresh Air. I am Terry Gross. My guest Ben Stiller has made a very personal documentary about his parents and what it was like to be their son.

Ben's father, Jerry Stiller, co-starred on Seinfeld playing Frank Costanza, George's father. Ben's mother, Anne Mira, was an actress. Together, Ben's parents were known as the comedy duo Stiller and Mira. They were so popular in the 60s and 70s, they were on the Ed Sullivan show more than 30 times. Sometimes Ben went with them to their appearances on TV talk shows and in nightclubs.

In 2020, five years after Mira's death, Jerry Stiller died. While Ben was going through his father's possessions, he was stunned to discover, stashed away, many cassette and reel to reel audio recordings Jerry Stiller had made and They documented his life and his relationship with Anne, including recordings of conversations with Anne in which they had disagreements about their marriage and their act. Some of those conversations are included in the documentary, along with video clips of their sketches from their TV appearances. The documentary Stiller and Mera, Nothing Is Lost, is streaming on Apple TV.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (50 minutes, 8,863 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.