Date of Birth: December 3, 1968
Place of Birth: Indianapolis, Ind., USA
Sign: Sun in Sagittarius, Moon in Taurus
Relations: Wife: Afton Smith
Education: Attended Upper Canada College in Toronto; BFA from the Actors' Conservatory, Cornish College of the Arts, Seattle, Washington.
BRENDAN FRASER IS not the first actor to have arrived in Hollywood dreaming of Shakespeare, only to find himself typecast in more ‘macho’ roles.
With his rakish good looks, Fraser seems tailor-made to play the kind of beefcake roles that appeal to the young-and-female box-office demographic. But ever since his first days in Tinseltown, this stage veteran has made a respectable number of films which have tapped into his years of dramatic training, in the process proving himself more than amply talented to one day extend his audience beyond the late-night-with-a-six-pack, video-watching crowd.
The son of a Canadian tourism official, Brendan and his three older brothers might just as well have been a rock band on tour for the kind of peripatetic upbringing their father's profession afforded the family. Touching down for brief periods in a series of European and Canadian cities, Fraser acquired an international education, gaining his knowledge of French in Ottawa, of Dutch during a stint in Hague. By the time he hit high school, Fraser's family had moved to Toronto, Canada. When in Canada, Fraser found himself unable to forget his dream of acting and consequently joined the theater department at the Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, Washington, where he pursued a fine arts degree with an emphasis on physical performance. The young performing arts graduate soon found steady work with Seattle's Intiman Theater, as well as with the Laughing Horse Summer Theater in Ellensburg, Washington, where he appeared in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night's Dream and Eugene Ionesco’s Waiting for Godot.
In January of 1991, after getting a one-line part in a film, Fraser borrowed his mom's Chevy Spectrum and headed for the palm-lined boulevards of Southern California. Unfortunately, the film was never released, but the bold career move bore fruit that same year when Fraser appeared in two made-for-TV movies: Guilty Until Proven Innocent and Child of Darkness, Child of Light. With a bit part that same year in the Vietnam-era romantic morality play, Dogfight, Fraser stood poised to advance his career on both the big and small screens.
When the time came for the up-and-coming actor's first major cinematic outing, as the character in 1992's Encino Man, the theatrical movement training in Fraser's collegiate past proved invaluable. In this celluloid slice o' So-Cal life, Fraser was charged with aping a Cro-Magnon man who is liberated from his ice cocoon only to commit the requisite series of predictably lame faux pas in his attempts to adapt to twentieth-century life. The film, which did little for his reputation as a serious actor, did manage to endear the heavy-lidded stunner to hunk-seekers everywhere. But Fraser had a sure-fire ace-in-the-hole: he had secured the respect of Paramount Pictures head Sherry Lansing, who, so the story goes, selected Fraser for the role of a Jewish kid on a boarding-school football scholarship circa 1950 in School Ties on the strength of his initial audition. "Brendan came into the room, very shy," Lansing remembers. "We said: 'Here are three scenes. Read.' And suddenly his stance changes. And this person emerges whom you can't take your eyes off. He's like all the good ones. They become the person." Fraser, himself the product of a boarding-school education, recalls his schooling without a trace of nostalgia: "I didn't fit in. They encouraged tremendous rivalry between different houses. We were like gang members in suits and ties." Putting these unpleasant memories to good use, Fraser turned in a performance that secured his ability to land dramatic roles, even after the debut of the critically maligned Encino Man marred an otherwise promising year.
Since his movie-land debut in the early nineties, Fraser's career has run hot and cold.
However, Fraser has become somewhat of a regular in the comedy genre, starring in a number of pictures that readily attest to the difficulty of realizing a funny screenplay that will actually fly. Yet, from the utterly forgettable comedy about a struggling band, Airheads to the story of a law student whose thesis is intercepted by a homeless man, With Honors, Fraser has consistently rated higher praise than the films in which he appears. However there have also been some flops like 1993's Twenty Bucks and 1996's Mrs. Winterbourne. Meanwhile, other movies came along, including a great performance in George of the Jungle and an acclaimed role in Gods and Monsters.
One thing’s for sure though, we are going to see a lot more of this man!
On the personal level, Brandon has been happily married to Afton Smith, with whom he says he found his soul mate.
Movies:
2000 The Mummy II
1999 Dudley Do-Right
1999 The Mummy
1999 Blast From the Past
1998 Ringside
1998 Still Breathing
1998 Gods and Monsters
1997 George of the Jungle
1997 Twilight of the Golds
1996 Glory Daze
1996 Brain Candy
1996 Mrs. Winterbourne
1995 The Pssion of Darkley Noon
1995 Balto
1995 Now and Then
1994 In the Army Now
1994 Airheads
1994 The Scout
1994 With Honors
1993 Younger and Younger
1993 Son in Law
1993 Twenty Bucks
1992 School Ties
1992 Encino Man
1991 Dogfight
TV:
1997 Twilight of the Golds
1994 The 1994 MTV Music Video Awards
1994 Duckman
1991 Guilty Until Proven Innocent
1991 Child of Darkness, Child of Light
© 2000 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
