The grandnephew of nightclub entrepreneur Sherman Billingsley, juvenile actor Peter Billingsley was nine years old when he was hired to provide the "children's angle" on the TV human interest series Real People. In 1982, Billingsley enjoyed his finest film role in A Christmas Story; he played humorist Jean Shepherd's youthful alter-ego Ralphie, whose repeated requests for a genuine Red Ryder B-B gun were invariably greeted with "You'll shoot your eye out!" As he grew older, his career lost momentum, waxing and waning through a string of variable projects. The most rewarding of Peter Billingsley's later film assignments was 1993's Arcade, in which he starred as a teenaged "virtual reality" addict.