Brendan Fraser Biography
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He was born Brendan James Fraser on the 3rd of December, 1968, in Indianapolis, to Canadian parents. The Frasers were an old Canadian family, with strong traditions in education and sport. Indeed, his uncle George had won a gold medal at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics.
His father, Peter, had been a journalist and now worked for the Canadian Government’s office of tourism. Mother Carol was a sales counsellor, and also looked after Brendan and his three older brothers – Kevin, Sean and Regan. Peter’s job took the family all over the world, meaning that, by the age of 13, Brendan had lived in Ottawa, Detroit, Cincinnati, London, Rome, Switzerland, Wassenaar in Holland, and Seattle. While in Holland, aged 7, he hung out with the “army brat” kids of military personnel, and took to calling himself a “Brochure Brat”.
By 12, he was in London, and this is where he first made contact with acting. Seeing a matinee of Oliver! in the West End, he was immediately taken with the thrill of it all. When his parents then chose to settle in Seattle, young Brendan quickly joined the chorus of a school production of Oklahoma! In the 8th Grade at the Sacred Heart school in Redmond, a suburb of Seattle, he would play Captain Corcoran in HMS Pinafore.
He remembers this as a real turning point. Making a grand entrance, he tossed his cape high in the air, only for it to land on his head. The audience, naturally, burst into laughter. What was he to do? Would he give in to embarrassment and walk off, or would he brave it out and continue? Recognising that, despite the laughter, he was having a great time, he went on. And has kept going on ever since.
At 13, Brendan had been sent to the Upper Canada College in Toronto, a prestigious boarding school. Here, though his academic averages were not good, he would work in the school’s little theatre, appearing in plays and revues, and acting as stage manager and ticket seller. Before his final year, though, Peter opted to leave his government office, thus losing Brendan’s tuition subsidy and bringing the boy back to Seattle.
Here Brendan, having decided that acting was to be his thing, would enrol at the Cornish College of the Arts, his degree emphasising physical performance. One major influence on the boy would be actor, clown and pantomimist Bill Irwin, who’d appeared in Eight Men Out and Robert Altman’s Popeye. Sneaking into Irwin’s show, The Regard Of Flight, Brendan was hugely impressed by an act that was funny, complex and impossible to categorise. Fraser decided there and then that he, too, would be more than just an actor.
Cornish was a high-class and fairly elitist establishment that taught theatre acting and frowned upon cinema, an attitude that Brendan picked up but did not hold onto for long. Onstage, he starred in The Marriage Of Bette And Boo. By 1991, his list of credits would be impressive. Having graduated in 1990, as a Bachelor of Fine Arts, he took a year-long internship at the Intiman Theatre, and was also a member of the Laughing Horse Summer Theatre. Thus, by his early twenties, he’d already appeared in such classics as Romeo And Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Three Sisters, Arms And The Man, The King Stag and The Madwoman Of Chaillot. Hard to believe that George Of the Jungle has such a classical background.
Eventually, though, the movies came to him. Casting director Sharon Bialy was in town, scouting for a film to be called Bound By Honour. Brendan auditioned, but wasn’t right for the Latino kid role she hoped to fill (in fact, the film was never made). However, she did notice that this “very shy, very gawky” boy seemed to come alive during the reading and she suggested he visit her if he ever came to Los Angeles. Perhaps she could introduce him to some agents, find him some auditions.
Brendan decided to give it a go. Turning down a second year’s internship at the Intiman, and also a Master of Fine Arts degree at the Southern Methodist University in Dallas, in January 1991 he borrowed his mother’s car and took off for the City of Angels.
Finding work straight away, he made his debut in Dogfight. Set in 1963, this concerned a group of young Marines spending their last night in San Francisco before departing for Vietnam. Boys being boys, they arrange a “dogfight”, a competition to see who can bring the ugliest girl to a party. The star, River Phoenix, picks on waitress Lili Taylor but, of course, discovers that she’s actually quite beautiful. Brendan had a brief, one-line part as a sailor. But what a line it was – “How would you like to eat my shit?”
This would be another turning point for Fraser. Still convinced that film acting was a lowly pursuit, he’d expected Phoenix to be empty-headed and arrogant. Instead, he’d found him to be sweet and helpful, qualities that finally broke down Brendan’s Cornish-bred attitude.
Quickly, TV work came his way. He had another small role in Child Of Darkness, Child Of Light, where a Catholic priest, investigating two immaculate conceptions, discovers that one of the children is God’s kid, and the other the Devil’s. But which is which, and can he find out before Satan’s little helpers come a-knocking? After this came a far beefier role, as the troubled adopted son of Martin Sheen and Caroline Kava in Guilty Until Proven Innocent. Convicted of a murder he didn’t commit, he must first convince Sheen of his innocence, then pray to be rescued. Next came My Old School, a pilot that proved barren.
1992 would be something of a breakthrough year. First came Encino Man, where Sean Astin and MTV-comic Pauly Shore discover a caveman, reanimate him, call him Link and introduce him to contemporary Californian culture, in the hope that their unusual new friend will bring popularity their way. It was pretty tepid stuff, but Brendan used his training in physical acting to proper effect as the charmingly innocent neanderthal, making the film an unexpected hit. In the next couple of years, he’d make cameos in two more Shore vehicles – Son In Law and In The Army Now – both times as characters named Link.
The same year brought another success, School Ties, actually filmed before Encino Man. Such was Brendan’s charisma at the audition that the casting director claimed the hairs stood up on the back of their neck for the first time since an early view of Bruce Willis, a decade previously. The movie took Brendan back to the Fifties, as a kid brought into an elite prep school on a football scholarship so he can help the school beat their deadliest rivals. Trouble is, Brendan’s Jewish – not a popular persuasion at the time – and, though he hides the fact, it comes out when he fights with mean-spirited rival Matt Damon over both a girl and the prime quarter-back position.
School Ties, also featuring Ben Affleck and Chris O’Donnell, was not a hit at the time, though it received good reviews for its sensitive perspective. Later, it would find cult status amongst teenagers raised on such shows as Dawson’s Creek.
The parts kept coming. Next came Twenty Bucks, an art-house piece that followed a $20 bill from its ATM birth to its eventual demise, changing and sometimes wrecking lives as it passes from hand to hand. Joining such mavericks as Christopher Lloyd, Steve Buscemi, William H. Macy and Elizabeth Shue, Brendan played a bridegroom who receives the note from his father-in-law as a wedding gift – a gift intended as a warning that money doesn’t come easily.
After this came Younger And Younger, where serial adulterer Donald Sutherland has to run the family storage business when his poor wife snuffs it. Even when son Brendan returns to help out, Donald continues to break down, his wife reappearing to him in his dreams, each time looking younger and more lovely. Even stranger was Brendan’s next project, an episode of Fallen Angels directed by Steven Soderbergh.
This saw Peter Coyote as a bar owner and Brendan as a hitman, both of them falling for the same bar-man. This would be followed by With Honours, where Brendan played a Harvard student who loses his thesis. Unfortunately, it’s discovered by dosser Joe Pesci, who’ll only return it page by page, in exchange for daily food and accommodation (Brendan, naturally, learns to respect him anyway).
What happened next could have been very different. Brendan was up for the part of cheating blue-blood Charles Van Doren in Quiz Show, but turned down the opportunity. For a start, he felt he’d done too many New England preppie roles and needed to spread his wings. He was also deeply intimidated by the movie’s director, Robert Redford, having earlier tried out for Redford’s A River Runs Through It but been pipped by Brad Pitt.
Instead, he went for another comedy, a zany piece called Airheads. Here he played Chazz, leader of hairy rock group The Lone Rangers, who, along with band-mates Rex (Buscemi) and Pip (Adam Sandler), hold up the local radio station with fake guns and force them to play their new single, Degenerated. No good can come of it.
Following this was The Scout, where Albert Brooks played a major league talent spotter, fallen on hard times and scouring Mexico for new blood. Amazingly, he discovers Steve Nebraska (Brendan), one of the best pitchers and batsmen he’s ever seen. Returning in triumph to the New York Yankees, he quickly discovers that not only is Brendan massively immature, he may also be unstable, so he hires therapist Dianne Wiest to dig deeper.
It was an odd film, part comedy, part psycho-drama and, though it widened Fraser’s repertoire, it did little for his career. Neither did his next role, a bit part as a Vietnam vet in the sappy chick-flick Now And Then. The Scout, though, did give Brendan the chance to throw the opening pitch at a Seattle Mariners game. Sadly, it was a disaster. “It was miserable,” he later recalled, “I pitched the worst slider you’ve ever seen”.
His next effort, though, DID make a difference. Going indie with Philip Ridley’s The Passion Of Darkly Noon, he played the title role of a poor innocent whose ultra-religious parents die, leaving him lost and alone. Deep in the woods, he stumbles upon the cottage of Ashley Judd and Viggo Mortensen, who take him in, only to find that, pulled apart by the conflict between his religious beliefs and his desire for Judd, he goes utterly mental.
It was an excellent movie, and a severe test of Fraser’s dramatic abilities. And the following year (1996) saw him challenging himself once again in a dual role in Mrs Winterbourne. Here he played the two sons of old matriarch Shirley Maclaine. The first son, Hugh, dies in a train crash along with his pregnant wife, a crash that Ricki Lake, as a down-and-out who’s also pregnant, survives. As this is the movies, the Winterbournes believe Lake to be Hugh’s wife (whom they’d never met), and take her into their aristocratic home, where second son Bill soon conquers his aversion to the loathsome working-class and falls for her.
After this came Glory Daze, written and directed by Rich Wilkes (author of Airheads), which concerned a communal house of Santa Cruz college kids a few days before graduation and the inevitable break-up of their laddish gang. A kind of punk rock Animal House, this featured Ben Affleck as well as stand-out cameos from Matt Damon, Matthew McConaughey and Brendan.
As if perturbed by these macho shenanigans, Brendan moved straight on to his second gay role, in the TV movie The Twilight Of The Golds. This saw Jennifer Beals as a young mother-to-be who, having her unborn child genetically tested, discovers that he may well turn out to be gay. This causes much tension in the family when it turns out that her mother and father (Faye Dunaway and Garry Marshall) would probably have aborted Jennifer’s brother, opera director Brendan, if they’d known his sexual proclivities before his birth. Taking a pop at both irresponsible scientists and closed-minded religion, the movie was unusually intriguing TV fare.
Now, at last, came a major breakthrough. Having lost out to Dermot Mulroney for a key role in Julia Roberts’ mega-hit My Best Friend’s Wedding, Brendan did score the lead in the wacky kids’ flick George Of The Jungle, based on the Sixties cartoon series. Here he played an unconscionably clumsy Tarzan figure, repeatedly crashing into trees, who’s discovered by a socialite on safari and taken back to San Francisco, only to return to save his ape brother from poachers. Adults would probably find the whole thing overly slapstick but, once more bringing his physical talents into play, Brendan became a huge star for children everywhere, scoring a huge hit in the process.
His next part could not have been more different. Where he’d suffered losing out to Dermot Mulroney the year before, now he enjoyed a slice of good fortune when Robert Downey Jr pulled out of Gods And Monsters. This saw Ian McKellen as James Whale, legendary director of Frankenstein, viewing his life in flashback as he spent his last days trying to get hunky gardener Brendan to pose naked for him (Brendan would refuse to disrobe, believing that a nude George Of The Jungle would detract from one of the film’s climactic scenes). The two actors worked well together, Brendan impressing as a he-man gradually opening out into a fuller creative life. Both McKellen and Lynn Redgrave, as his disapproving housekeeper, would be Oscar-nominated.
For Fraser, working with McKellen was a dream come true. Back at Cornish, he’d studied the great man’s Acting Shakespeare tapes and came near to idolising him. When, a few years before Gods and Monsters, McKellen was casting for his black shirt version of Richard III, Brendan had gone to audition AND written a personal card to McKellen, begging for a role.
The casting directors weren’t kind, but Brendan did receive a handwritten reply from McKellen, saying that the project could do with Brendan’s enthusiasm but, sorry, there just wasn’t a place for him. Brendan would show McKellen the card when they met up to prepare for Gods And Monsters and, on many mornings, would drive to McKellen’s rented home in the Hollywood Hills and make his breakfast – all the while taking the chance to discuss their shared craft.
For his own part, McKellen would say of Fraser: “I didn’t appreciate Brendan’s performance while it was happening. I’ve talked to somebody who worked with Marilyn Monroe, and (he) said the same of her. You could only see it through the camera or on the screen”.
1998 also saw Brendan in Still Breathing, where he played a San Antonio puppeteer who dreams of LA con artist Joanna Going and sets out to find her. Will fate bring them together? You betcha. It was a sweet romance, with a supernatural edge – and it earned Brendan his first major award, as Best Actor at the Seattle International Film Festival (hometown boy makes good).
Life only got better, too, as the same year saw him marry his long-time girlfriend Afton Smith (named after a Scottish river in a Robert Burns poem), a former actress, one year his senior, who’d appeared in the likes of Less Than Zero, Fried Green Tomatoes and Reality Bites. The pair had met at Winona Ryder’s 4th of July barbecue in 1993 where Fraser had been taken by Airheads director Michael Lehmann. Actually, Fraser had first met Smith’s dog, a collie mix called Wile E. When Smith came looking for her pooch, she found him with Brendan and said “Wile E, what did you find?” What, indeed.
Their engagement was no less amusing. On holiday in Paris, Brendan found himself too shy to pop the question, and forged a cunning plan. He’d pin a note saying “Will you marry me?” inside his jacket then, as he and Afton posed for timed Polaroid shots, he would open the jacket as the camera fired so she would see it when the photo came out.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t that simple. The camera misfired, it fell over, the light was wrong, the note was too small, it went on for ages. Eventually, she spotted the note in one shot and, thinking it was a stray price tag, opened his jacket. At that moment, he bent to pick up something he’d dropped. Well, while he was on one knee, what else could he say? The couple would bear their first child, Griffin Arthur, in 2002.
There would be one more minor hit before Brendan achieved a stardom that stretched beyond the nursery. In Blast From The Past, he played the son of paranoid inventor Christopher Walken and obedient mother Sissy Spacek. Back in the Sixties, with the Cold War at its chilliest, Walken suspects a nuclear attack and hides with his family in a home-made fall-out shelter. Running out of supplies 35 years later, they send Fraser out into a world they’re convinced will be filled with dangerous mutants. He must bring back provisions and, if possible, a non-mutant wife, in order to re-populate the Earth.
This was classic Fraser. Chunky, but charmingly bashful and beatifically innocent, he trudged, wide-eyed, through the streets of modern-day Los Angeles, clearly blown away by the novelty and craziness of it all. And then he meets street-smart Alicia Silverstone. As in so many of his movies, he was a fish miles from water.
And now came the big one. In Stephen Sommers’ The Mummy he played Rick O’Connell, a slightly dodgy adventurer who helps Egyptologist Rachel Weisz discover Hamunaptra, the city of the dead. Seeking both knowledge and treasure, they inadvertently awaken the cursed mummy Imhotep, who wants to use Weisz’s body to resurrect his long-dead lover, and then, naturally, to take over the world. It was a fantastic movie, the first to capture the spirit of epic adventure since Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom, and quite rightly shattered the $100 million mark.
Immediately, Brendan consolidated with Dudley Do-Right. Directed by Blast From The Past’s Hugh Wilson, this was, like George Of The Jungle, based on a Sixties cartoon, and saw Brendan as a super-clean-cut Mountie battling intrigue and megalomania in a small mountain town. Here, Snidely Whiplash (Alfred Molina) is planning to buy up all the property and then start a fake gold rush. Can Dudley stop him, and will he end up with Sarah Jessica Parker?
Once more, this was an appropriate role for the shy and steady Fraser, not least because his great-great-grandfather had been a Mountie in the late 19th Century. But far more challenging was his next role, in Harold Ramis’s Bedazzled, a remake of the Peter Cook/ Dudley Moore classic. Here, Elizabeth Hurley played a voluptuous Satan, granting tech-nerd Brendan seven wishes he can use to win his true love, the excellent Frances O’Connor. For these she will take his immortal soul but, hey, love is love. Brendan evidently had a ball, playing a multitude of separate roles, including a Columbian drug lord, a famous novelist, a rock star and Abraham Lincoln.
The comedy continued in 2001 with Monkeybone. Here Brendan was a cartoonist who falls into a coma and finds himself trapped in Dark Town, a cartoon world of his own creation. Seeking help from the treacherous title character (voiced by John Turturro), he gains an Exit pass from Death (Whoopi Goldberg) only to have Monkeybone steal it and inhabit his worldly body. Playing opposite animations is one of the hardest cinematic tests – behaving as if you’ve been possessed by one is a sterner challenge still. Yet Fraser came through with flying colours.
Next came another major money-spinner, with The Mummy Returns. Set 10 years after the original, it had Fraser now married to Weisz and living in London with their young child. When Imhotep’s mummy is brought to the British Museum and re-animated once again, they must do what they can to stop him unleashing an unspeakable evil upon the world. And now there’s the Scorpion King to contend with, too. It was all-out action, Fraser managing to injure his knees, crack a rib and tear a spinal disc in the process. He’d take a break in London’s West End – the place where he’d been turned on to acting so many years before – playing Brick in Tennessee Williams’ Cat On A Hot Tin Roof.
The Mummy Returns was a reasonable effort, and made a few billion bob, but with a confused storyline and some weak computer generations it was a disappointment after the rousing original. Brendan moved on to something infinitely more serious, starring alongside Michael Caine in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. Here Caine played a cynical and drug-addled Times journalist in 1952 Saigon, who meets an idealistic aid worker – Brendan. But Brendan is not all he seems, as Caine comes to notice as social unrest turns to all-out war, and Brendan turns up everywhere (not least in the bedroom of Caine’s Vietnamese mistress). It was a tough movie, charting the origins of the US war in south-east Asia, and both Caine and Fraser were superb.
Now seen as an affable hero in the style of Cary Grant, Brendan also continued to follow in the extreme slapstick footsteps of his own great hero Buster Keaton by taking on the ‘toons once more in Looney Tunes: The Movie.
Having received $12.5 million for The Mummy Returns, Fraser could now do pretty much as he pleased. And he did, indulging his passions for travel, culture and photography. There seems little doubt that this brilliant physical actor, a star with kids, teens and now adults, will continue to find top roles and be able to indulge himself to his heart’s content for some considerable time to come.
In March 2006, he was inducted into Canada’s Walk of Fame, the first American-born actor to receive the honor. However, as of 2008, he does not have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. After a six year hiatus in the franchise, Fraser returned for the second sequel to The Mummy released in August 2008 and titled The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. Filming started in Montreal on July 27, 2007 and the movie also starred Jet Li as Emperor Han. The last Mummy film grossed over $102 million in the USA and over $400 million worldwide.
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