Lorre, 56, grew up in Plainville, N.Y., and his first love was music. He was moved to write by Bob Dylan's "magical musical journeys" and the "little worlds with characters and viewpoints" created by Randy Newman.
"I also saw Jimi Hendrix light a guitar on fire when I was 17 and that kind of explosive power -- what rock and roll can do -- it made a big impact," he said. "Music was everything back then. TV was nothing. TV was 'Bewitched' and 'My Mother the Car.' When you had the Stones, the Beatles, Dylan, Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Airplane, the Doors and the Who -- television? Come on!"
He pursued songwriting and spent a decade touring the country as a guitarist for hire until he had children and needed a stable income and health insurance. Intuitively, he believed he could make it as a comedy writer, so he wrote scripts and begged for pitch meetings.
That Lorre began his TV career in 1987, when he was 35, speaks volumes about his work ethic. His list of credits is long and storied, having written, produced and/or created eight sitcoms in 22 years. Only one was a failure and five were considered hits, including "Roseanne," on which he got his big break in 1990.
Lorre's track record earned him a kind of prestige last month not usually bestowed upon television writer-producers: a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame near Dick Van Dyke's.
"It's staggering," Lorre said a few days before the ceremony, adding that he hadn't processed precisely what the honor meant to him. By the time his star was unveiled across the street from the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, he had figured it out.
"Chuck talked about how all of his success is ultimately the result of his promise when he was a starving musician that he would find some way to feed his two children," said Bill Prady, co-creator of "Big Bang." "It was very clear that the star was a reward for taking care of his family rather than his achievements in show business."
The product of a "childhood bereft of love," Lorre -- whose birth name was Chuck Levine -- has been divorced twice and doesn't like talking about those times publicly anymore, unless he's writing about them in his popular vanity cards. It's a tradition he began on "Dharma & Greg," using the few seconds of air time that other producers use to display company titles as a journal. They're also available on his website, ChuckLorre.com.
