He was the youngest of ten children, born into a loud, intellectual, deeply Catholic household where debate was encouraged and curiosity was never punished. But when he was just ten years old, that world collapsed in a single morning.

In 1974, his father—a respected doctor and academic—and two of his brothers were killed in a plane crash while traveling to enroll the boys at a boarding school. The flight never reached its destination. It went down just miles from the runway, leaving only a handful of survivors and tearing the heart out of one family.

For the boy left behind, grief didn’t explode loudly. It settled quietly.

He later described how his childhood ended overnight. The house grew still. The noise of siblings disappeared. Ordinary worries vanished, replaced by something heavier and harder to name. He and his mother—who had already endured more loss than most people face in a lifetime—learned how to exist together in a new, muted reality.
Years later, Stephen Colbert would reflect on that time with startling clarity. He spoke about being “personally shattered,” about how grief doesn’t simply pass but reshapes you. His mother, he said, found purpose in caring for him. And he, still a child, found himself caring for her in return.

School stopped making sense after the crash. Rules and grades felt irrelevant. Instead, he disappeared into books—especially fantasy and science fiction. The worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien gave him structure when real life felt broken beyond repair. His Catholic faith also became an anchor, not because it offered easy answers, but because it gave him permission to sit with sorrow without turning away from it.

He noticed early how Southern accents were mocked on television, portrayed as a shorthand for ignorance. So he trained himself to speak like a news anchor, flattening his voice, perfecting his diction—learning, without realizing it, the mechanics of performance.

Comedy wasn’t the goal. Drama was. He dreamed of becoming a serious actor, someone who carried weight and gravitas. But grief has a way of rerouting ambition.