Brendan Fraser

Brendan James Fraser (/ˈfreɪzər/ FRAY-zər; born December 3, 1968) is an American-Canadian actor. Fraser had his breakthrough in 1992 with the comedy Encino Man and the drama School Ties. He gained further prominence for his starring roles in the comedies With Honors (1994) and George of the Jungle (1997) and emerged as a star playing Rick O'Connell in The Mummy trilogy (1999–2008). He took on dramatic roles in Gods and Monsters (1998), The Quiet American (2002), and Crash (2004), and further fantasy roles in Bedazzled (2000) and Journey to the Center of the Earth (2008).

Fraser's film work slowed from the late 2000s to mid-2010s due to poor box office performances, and various health and personal issues, including the fallout from a sexual assault committed against him in 2003 by Philip Berk, the then-president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. In addition to films, Fraser branched into television with roles in the Showtime drama The Affair (2016–2017), the FX series Trust (2018), and the Max series Doom Patrol (2019–2023).

His film career was revitalized by roles in Steven Soderbergh's No Sudden Move (2021) and Darren Aronofsky's The Whale (2022), the latter of which earned him critical acclaim and numerous accolades, including the Academy Award for Best Actor – the first ever Canadian to do so.

Fraser was born on December 3, 1968, in Indianapolis, Indiana, to Canadian parents Carol Mary (née Généreux; 1937–2016) and Peter Fraser. He is the youngest of four siblings; his brothers are Kevin, Sean, and Regan. His mother was a sales counselor, and his father was a former journalist who worked as a Canadian foreign service officer for the Government Office of Tourism. His maternal uncle, George Genereux, was the only Canadian to win a gold medal in the 1952 Summer Olympics, at the Olympic Trap. Fraser and his three older brothers have Irish, Scottish, German, Czech, and French-Canadian ancestry. He holds dual American and Canadian citizenship.

Fraser's family moved often during his childhood, living in Eureka, California; Seattle, Washington; Ottawa, Ontario; the Netherlands; and Switzerland. His earlier years were spent attending a Montessori school in Detroit and the Sacred Heart School in Bellevue, Washington. He then attended Upper Canada College, a private boarding school in Toronto, from which he graduated in 1987.^{[citation needed]}

While on vacation in London, England, in the 1970s, he attended his first professional theater-show, Oliver!, in the West End, which sparked his interest in acting. He also joined the chorus of a high-school musical production of Oklahoma!

Fraser graduated from Seattle's Cornish College of the Arts in 1990. He then began acting at a small acting college in New York City. Fraser had planned on studying toward a Master of Fine Arts in Acting from Southern Methodist University, but after visiting Hollywood, he decided instead to move there to pursue work in film.

In 1991, Fraser made his film debut with a small role as a seaman headed to Vietnam in Dogfight. He got his first leading film role alongside Sean Astin and Pauly Shore in the 1992 comedy film Encino Man, where he played a frozen pre-historic caveman who is thawed out in the present day. The film was a moderate box office success and has gained a cult following. That same year he starred in School Ties with fellow rising actors Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, and Chris O'Donnell as a Jewish star quarterback confronting embedded anti-semitism in private prep school society.