Chris Gardner

Gardner was sleeping in a subway station bathroom in Oakland with his toddler son while working an unpaid stockbroker training programme at Dean Witter in the early eighties. He finished it, founded his own brokerage in Chicago years later, and told the story in a memoir that became a film with Will Smith. The film invented several of its best-known scenes, the medical scanner chase among them; his own account is less cinematic and in places harder. He has spoken about his mother's imprisonment and his stepfather's violence, and spends most of his time now speaking and on homelessness projects.