Tommy Chong Biography Home | add famous canadian | edit person

Chong is the son of Stanley (of Chinese descent), a truck driver, and Lorna Jean Chong (of Scots-Irish ancestry). Chong was married in 1975 to wife Shelby. He has six children: sons Paris, Marcus, and Gilbran, and daughters Precious, Robbi, and Rae Dawn Chong. Marcus and Rae Dawn are both actors.

When Chong was still young, the family moved to Calgary, to a neighborhood Chong refers to as the Dog Patch. He says that his father had "been wounded in World War II, and there was a veteran's hospital in Calgary. He bought a five-hundred dollar house in Dog Patch, and raised his family on fifty dollars a week."

By age eleven Chong was playing guitar, chiefly country-and-western music. Soon, he was introduced to rhythm and blues, became a professional musician, and quit school. He formed one of Calgary's earliest rhythm and blues bands, the Shades, but was eventually requested by the police to leave town after a particularly rowdy gig, according to his account. Chong and the Shades then left for the closest metropolis, Vancouver, where Chong bought a club, the Elegant Parlour, and played guitar and sang in the house band, a Motown band named Bobby Taylor and the Vancouvers, briefly featuring a very young Jimi Hendrix. Among his compositions for the group were "Does Your Mama Know About Me", which hit #29 on the US pop chart and #5 on the US R&B chart.

Cheech and Chong, while one of the most successful comedy acts of all time, experienced creative differences and split in 1985. This was devastating to Chong. To him, Cheech was "closer than a wife. The only thing we didn't do was have sex." Of their split, he says, "It was like a death in the family. I don't know if I'll ever get over it."

Chong was a recurring character and later a regular character as the hippie "Leo" during the second, third, fourth, seventh, and eighth seasons of That 70's Show. He also played a role as a hippie in Dharma and Greg.

Cheech and Chong - Chong

That 70's Show - Leo

Dharma and Greg - the hippy