Kevin was born April 26, 1965. He attended Cortland University where he played fullback on the football team while majoring in sports management. He realized after 3 years that this wasn't the path for him. After returning home he decided to go...
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Kevin was born April 26, 1965. He attended Cortland University where he played fullback on the football team while majoring in sports management. He realized after 3 years that this wasn't the path for him. After returning home he decided to go back home and to break up the monotony of the summer he joined a community theater. During a play in which he had a comedic role, he so enjoyed the crowd reaction, that he joined his brother's (comedian Gary Valentine) improv group. He began going to clubs with Gary and realized he, too, had the knack for comedy. He has performed standup up for about 11 years. It was on the comedy circuit that he met Ray Romano. While Ray was getting a big break with his own sitcom, Kevin was getting recognition on Star Search. After appearing on The Tonight Show, his big break came at the 1996 "Just for Laughs" Montreal Comedy Festival. Afterward he landed a recurring role on Ray's sitcom, "Everybody Loves Raymond". He has since received his own sitcom "The King of Queens". April 2000 - Kevin lives in an L.A. bachelor pad with his brother, Gary Valentine, who is also a stand-up comedian. Career started with a recurring role on "Everbody Loves Raymond" 1997-98 His big break came in 1996 when he won at the "Just for Laughs" Montreal Comedy Festival. In June 1999 and 2000, Kevin James hosted the Florida Sports Awards, the official sports award show for the state of Florida, in Jacksonville, Fla. This event raises funds for the Otis F. Smith Foundation.

This talented, thoughtful actor turned down a chance for lucrative steady work in TV to pursue a career in feature films. Saved from the perils of the streets of NYC's Harlem by attending acting classes in his youth, Allen Payne received his first...
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This talented, thoughtful actor turned down a chance for lucrative steady work in TV to pursue a career in feature films. Saved from the perils of the streets of NYC's Harlem by attending acting classes in his youth, Allen Payne received his first wide exposure playing a recurring role as Lance Rodman during the last seasons (1990-92) of the NBC sitcom "The Cosby Show". He was one of the wisecracking friends of Pam Tucker (Erika Alexander), Clair Huxtable's young cousin from the inner-city. Though he passed on a regular gig to reprise the role on "A Different World", Payne shared Mr. Cosby's concern about providing role models for black youth.

Payne embodied a cautionary tale in Mario Van Peebles' "New Jack City" (1991) as Gee Money, lieutenant to Wesley Snipes' ascendant cocaine king Nino Brown. The young actor claimed to know his character from his old 'hood.

Similarly for "CB4" (1993), an unsuccessful spoof of the hip-hop scene, Payne was able to call upon his experiences in the suburbs--where his parents relocated to escape the ghetto--to play a middle-class Black man who adopts a tough "gangsta" persona to perform rap music.

He received better notices and more attention as a straight arrow romantic lead in "Jason's Lyric" (1994) as a young man anguished by his wayward younger brother (Bokeem Woodbine) and inspired by a dreamy young woman (Jada Pinkett).

Payne's next film, the well-meaning but underwhelming black-oriented Vietnam drama "The Walking Dead" (also 1994), hardly made a ripple, but the actor remained true to form playing a dedicated Dad who enlisted to provide base housing for his young family.

Payne received his most high profile film assignment in the critically lambasted Eddie Murphy horror vehicle "Vampire in Brooklyn" (1995). Here he was Justice, a homicide cop partnered with Angela Bassett with whom he develops an increasingly strong emotional bond.

That year, Payne also appeared amid an impressive ensemble of young Black Hollywood (including Laurence Fishburne, Cuba Gooding Jr, Malcolm Jamal Warner and Courtney B Vance) in the HBO made-for-cable movie "The Tuskegee Airmen".