Two days before Thanksgiving in 1964, Tim Allen attended his father’s funeral as a then 11-year-old boy (Timothy Alan Dick). A few days earlier, a drunk driver swerved across I-70, went through a median and landed on top of the Dick family car driving home from a Colorado football game.
Although Gerald Dick’s wife and several other children were in the car and two older brothers were injured, the 40-year-old father of six was the only fatality in the automobile accident, dying “in my mother’s lap,” Allen would later say.
“He was a great dad, love of my life,” he recalled in a 2025 interview.
Allen had been at a friend’s house that day. And soon after being told about his father’s death, he remembers being told by an uncle, “No, there’ll be no crying. I don’t want your grandma upset.”
“Everybody’s answer was, ‘He’s in a better place,’” Allen has also said, leading him to ask himself — why are we in such a painful one?
“It never got answered. … The pain of it never stopped, the discomfort of it.”
“If you haven’t had a death in your family … it changes everything from your cells and DNA turns a different color,” Allen would say in a 2006 interview. “Every single thing in my life changed.”
From then on, Allen recalled having “a curious relationship with God.”
“For years, I just did not like this idea of God, church,” he said in a 2011 interview. “(I was) still a churchgoer, but constantly a cynic.”
From federal inmate to Hollywood star
That attitude sounds about right for someone in Hollywood these days. Yet long before Americans fell in love with Tim “The Toolman” in the 1990s, that shaken 11-year-old boy had some other difficult roles to play, including as a 25-year-old federal inmate.
After getting arrested in 1978 at the Kalamazoo/Battle Creek International Airport, carrying more than a pound of cocaine in his luggage, Allen spent two years and four months at the Federal Correctional Institution in Sandstone, Minnesota.
“When I went to jail, reality hit so hard that it took my breath away,” Allen later told the Los Angeles Daily News “Prison grew me up. I was an adolescent that woke up too early when my father was killed, and I stayed at that angry adolescent level.”
Humor also helped him survive, Allen said, eventually getting “some of the toughest prisoners and even guards” to laugh.
After getting out on mandatory work release for a job at a Detroit advertising agency, Allen returned to finish college at Western Michigan University. He also started stand-up at a Detroit comedy club.
An opportunity to appear in a commercial for Travelers Insurance led to more commercials, then bookings on regional comedy shows, then national clubs. Eventually Showtime featured him in a proudly obscene series called “Comedy’s Dirtiest Dozen” in 1988.
In the 1990s, Allen’s public persona shifted to something more family friendly in the eight seasons of ABC’s popular “Home Improvement” (1991-1999) — followed by breakout movies “The Santa Clause” (1994) and “Toy Story” (1995).
Along with sequels to “The Santa Clause” in 2002 and 2006, and “Christmas with Kranks” (2004), Allen has seen additional success with the sitcoms “Last Man Standing” (2011-2021) and “Shifting Gears.”
Even with this success, Allen was arrested in 1997 for drunk driving, and entered rehab. He’s admitted this period of early professional success (and alcohol) had a negative impact on his family.
Growing in belief
Allen recently quoted Emmet Fox as saying, “Most people will not undertake the search for God wholeheartedly unless driven thereto by trouble of some kind” — adding, “so true for me.”
“I have nothing but gratitude,” Allen later said about his experience of finally getting sober (22 years as of 2025). “It’s been a struggle because not being able to hide behind drugs and alcohol was difficult for me. Now I deal with stuff. ... It’s moment by moment.”
Becoming a father a second time in 2009 also intensified the actor’s sense of purpose, and divine intention — with his earlier cynicism fading. “Whoever built me, this is too much,” he said in 2011. He said it’s “too weird that it happened by accident. It didn’t happen by accident.”
Allen even described humor as something “given,” not manufactured, and sees it as part of how “the Builder” wired him.
In 2022, Allen advocated for faith to be central to the spinoff Disney+ series “The Santa Clauses.” When the original plot featured “a lot of otherworldly characters, and ghosts, and goblins,” Allen objected. “No, this is Christ-mas. It’s Christ-mas. It literally is a religious holiday.”
Allen told The Wrap at the time, “We don’t have to blow trumpets, but I do want you to acknowledge it — that’s what this is about. If you want to get into Santa Claus, you’re gonna have to go back to history, and it’s all about religion.”
(Although the final product includes a scene with a bishop-like figure, St. Nicholas of Myra, many parents were disappointed by multiple usages of God’s name as profanity, and a scene with elves holding up signs that say “We love you Satan” instead of “We love you Santa.”)
It’s an understatement to say Allen’s life has been exciting and novel over the past three decades of success. But something happened last year that surprised even this American icon.
Turning to God’s words
“Never took the time in all my years to ever read and really read the Bible,” Allen posted in August of 2024 — sharing how his early focus was on the Old Testament, before anticipating turning to the New Testament.
“So far amazing and not at all what I was expecting.”
The actor’s navigation of more ancient language was not always easy, posting two months later about finishing “a rather intense Ezekiel” and being stretched to translate for himself how the “Eternal expresses” matters — adding, “I need a Snickers.”
Allen wasn’t in a hurry. In February of 2025, he announced he’d finished the entire Old Testament after a year, saying “the experience of rereading, dedicated focus and no drifting has made this a humbling, overwhelming experience. What a treasure.”
Allen also shared that he was “three days into (the) New Testament.”
This summer, the beloved actor posted about finishing the Old Testament again and what he was learning in the New Testament. He again sounded a little shocked at what the experience was adding to his life: “I am amazed.”
‘What did you want me to do?’
In that earlier 2011 interview, Allen had described often asking God questions like “where do you want me to go?” and “what did you want me to do?”
“I do ask it, but you’ve got to be prepared for the answer,” he said.
The fruits of this kind of humble prayer are apparent in the actor’s life. This fall, Allen followed through on something he’d wrestled to do for many decades — forgiving publicly the driver who killed his father, inspired by the example of Erika Kirk, whose husband, Charlie Kirk, was assassinated in September.
“I have struggled for over 60 years to forgive the man who killed my Dad,” he wrote. “I will say those words now as I type: ‘I forgive the man who killed my father.’”
Allen concluded, “Peace be with you all.”