Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman) and his wife Etheline (Anjelica Huston) had three children: Chas (Ben Stiller), Richie (Luke Wilson), and Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow), and then they separated. Chas started buying real estate in his early teens and seemed to have an almost preternatural understanding of international finance. Margot was a playwright and received a Braverman Grant of fifty thousand dollars in the ninth grade. Richie was a junio champion tennis player and won the U.S. Nationals three years in a row. Virtually all memory of the brilliance of the young Tenenbaums was subsequently erased by two decades of betrayal, failure, and disaster. Most of this was generally considered to be their father's fault.