Shia Saide LaBeouf was born in Los Angeles, California, to Shayna (Saide) and Jeffrey Craig LaBeouf, and is an only child. His mother is from an Ashkenazi Jewish family, while his father has Cajun (French) ancestry. His parents are divorced. He started his career by doing stand-up comedy around places in his neighborhood, such as coffee clubs. One day, he saw a friend of his acting on Docteur Quinn, femme médecin (1993), and wanted to become an actor. Shia and his mother talked it over, and the next day, he started looking for an agent. He searched in the yellow pages, called one up, and did a stand-up routine in front of him. They liked him and signed him, and then he started auditioning. He is well known for playing Louis Stevens on the popular Disney Channel series La guerre des Stevens (1999) and has won a Daytime Emmy Award for his performance. His best known role is as Sam Witwicky, the main protagonist of the first three installments of the Transformers series: Transformers (2007), Transformers - La revanche (2009) and Transformers 3: La face cachée de la lune (2011).
