Who Is Irving H. Vincent? The Man Who Raised Vin Diesel

Crystal Field caught the kids in the act. A group of them had broken into her theater on Jane Street, a block from the Hudson River piers, and they had not come to watch a show. One was seven years old. Field, who ran the place, could have called the police. Instead she handed them scripts and told them to come back the next afternoon and learn their lines.

That seven-year-old was Mark Sinclair, known today as Vin Diesel. He kept coming back to the theater for years, working through a children’s play called Dinosaur Door, then a neighborhood repertory company, then the small rooms of Off-Off-Broadway. He owed that start to the man who had already made theater the family business, his adoptive father, Irving H. Vincent.

Who is Irving H. Vincent?

Irving H. Vincent is an American theater director and acting instructor, best known as the adoptive father of actor Vin Diesel. Born on November 4, 1934, in Alameda, California, he spent decades in New York theater and later taught media studies at New York University. He raised his family in Westbeth, the artists’ housing complex in Greenwich Village.

Here are the basics at a glance:

• Full name: Irving H. Vincent
• Born: November 4, 1934, in Alameda, California
• Occupation: Theater director, acting instructor, NYU lecturer
• Spouse: Delora Sherleen Vincent
• Children: Vin Diesel and Paul Vincent (adopted), Samantha and Tim Vincent
• Known for: His New York theater work and for raising Vin Diesel

One detail is worth correcting. Some pages list his birth year as 1925, but that does not hold up. In November 2022, Vin Diesel posted a photo wishing his father a happy 88th birthday, which places the year at 1934.

The theater career behind the name

Long before his son became one of Hollywood’s highest-grossing actors, Vincent worked the New York theater scene as a director and manager. According to People, he staged off-Broadway productions, including work at the New Federal Theatre, the company founded in 1970 to support Black artists in American theater.

He went on to teach entertainment and media studies at New York University, where he created a course he called the Media Workshop. That course later became the basis for a film-training program his son would run, though that came much later.

Home was Westbeth, on Bethune Street in the West Village. The building had been the Bell Telephone Laboratories complex until the city converted it in 1970 into subsidized housing and studios for artists and their families, the first project of its kind in the country. Diane Arbus shot photographs there. Merce Cunningham choreographed there. The Vincent family earned a place because of Irving’s work as a theater director and teacher.

How Vin Diesel got his name

The “Vin” in Vin Diesel comes from Vincent. When Irving married Delora Sherleen around 1970, he adopted her twin sons, and the boy born Mark Sinclair grew up as Mark Sinclair Vincent.

The stage name came later. As a teenager working the door at New York nightclubs in the 1980s, among them the Tunnel, he wanted something tougher than Mark. He shortened Vincent to “Vin.” The “Diesel” was a nickname from fellow bouncers who joked that he ran on diesel fuel because his energy never seemed to quit. The actor whose biggest films sell audiences on the idea of family has carried his adoptive father’s name on every poster since.

Training a generation of filmmakers

Vincent’s biggest project came later in life, and it grew straight out of that NYU course.

When Vin Diesel set up his nonprofit, the One Race Global Film Foundation, he built its teaching program on his father’s coursework. He told Variety in 2013 that the foundation’s Summer Intensive Institute came directly from the Media Workshop Irving taught. Then he brought Irving in to run it, flying him to the Dominican Republic to teach in person.

“We came up with this deal, where I brought my father down, and the concept was to teach these kids how to do things right,” Diesel told the magazine.

Under Vincent’s instruction, the program trained 210 young filmmakers, some of whom went on to NYU themselves. By 2013 it had drawn students from Haiti, Guadeloupe, Pakistan, Trinidad and Tobago, Israel, Senegal, and Yemen. Samantha Vincent, Irving’s daughter and the president of Diesel’s One Race Films, summed it up for Variety: “Every student comes out a filmmaker.”

Inside the Vincent family

Irving and Delora raised four children together at Westbeth.

Vin and his fraternal twin, Paul, were adopted. Paul Vincent stayed behind the camera, working as a sound editor on his brother’s 1995 short film Multi-Facial and later running an entertainment marketing company. Samantha Vincent became a Hollywood producer and runs One Race Films, with credits across the Fast & Furious movies. Tim Vincent, the fourth, has stayed almost entirely out of public view.

Vin and Paul never met their biological father. Irving raised the twins as his own, and Diesel has spoken about him for years as his only dad.

Where is Irving H. Vincent now?

The public record goes quiet after 2022. The last clear glimpse came that November, when Diesel shared the birthday photo of his father in a gold party hat, a grandchild leaning into him, and wrote: “Happy 88th birthday to my first inspiration… my dad. All love, always.” No reliable reporting has appeared about him since, in either direction.

He rarely sought attention. One of the few times he appeared in public was August 2013, at Vin Diesel’s Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony, where he posed with the family alongside Delora, Diesel’s partner Paloma Jiménez, and the grandchildren.

His name sits in the credits of one of the most profitable film franchises ever made, yet his own public footprint stayed small. He spent his career in rehearsal spaces and classrooms rather than on red carpets. His influence is easier to find in the people he taught and raised than in anything written about him.

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