Life Story

		Biography
		Bibliography
		Film and Career

Viggo Peter Mortensen, Jr. (born October 20, 1958) is an American theater and movie actor, poet, musician, photographer and painter. He is best known for his role as Aragorn in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings film trilogy.

Acting Career: After several years of experience in live theater, he made his first movie appearance playing an Amish farmer in Peter Weir's Witness. (Mortensen had actually been cast in two prior films - Swing Shift and The Purple Rose of Cairo - but his scenes in both of these films were deleted from the final cuts.) He has also appeared in Jane Campion's The Portrait of a Lady, Sean Penn's Indian Runner, Brian DePalma's Carlito's Way, Tony Scott's Crimson Tide, Ridley Scott's G.I. Jane, Tony Goldwyn's A Walk on the Moon, Philip Ridley's Reflecting Skin, Andrew Davis's A Perfect Murder, Betty Thomas's 28 Days and David Cronenberg's A History of Violence.

Mortensen's performance in Bent at the Coast Playhouse, Los Angeles, won him a Dramalogue Critics' Award. Coincidentally, the play, about homosexual concentration camp prisoners, was originally brought to prominence by Sir Ian McKellen, with whom Mortensen co-starred in The Lord of the Rings. In Lord of the Rings, Mortensen was a last-minute replacement for Stuart Townsend, and wouldn't have taken the part if it hadn't been for his son's enthusiasm for J. R. R. Tolkien's trilogy.

In 2004, he starred as Frank Hopkins in Hidalgo, the story of a Pony Express courier who travels to Arabia to compete with his horse, Hidalgo, in a dangerous race for a massive contest prize.

Visual Arts: Mortensen is also a painter, and photographer. His paintings are frequently abstract, and often contain fragments of his poetry in them. His paintings have been featured in galleries worldwide, and several appeared in A Perfect Murder.

Discography: Mortensen experiments with his poetry and music by frequently crossing over the styles. The guitarist Buckethead collaborates on many of his recordings.

His discography includes: Don't Tell Me What to Do, Intelligence Failure, One Less Thing to Worry About, One Man's Meat, Live at Beyond Baroque, The Other Parade, This That and The Other, Live at Beyond Baroque 2, Pandemoniumfromamerica, and Please Tomorrow.

His voice is featured on The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King soundtrack - he sings 'Aragorn's Coronation', the words by Tolkien but the music composed by Mortensen himself. His poems are written in English, Danish, and Spanish.

Background: Mortensen was born in New York City, although spent some childhood years in Venezuela, Argentina, and his father's native Denmark, before returning to high school in Watertown, New York (where he was captain of the swim team). He graduated from St. Lawrence University in 1980.

His Danish father and half-Norwegian mother met in Norway. Henry and Viggo have done public father/son poetry reading together as recently as March 2006.

He has a son, Henry Blake, with his ex-wife Exene Cervenka of the band X.

He is fluent in English, Norwegian, Spanish and somewhat fluent in Danish. He also speaks French, Italian, and Swedish reasonably well. Mortensen has dual citizenship in the US and Denmark.

Mortensen is an ice hockey fan, particularly of the Montreal Canadiens. He also likes soccer and is a big fan of the Danish national team and the Argentinian team San Lorenzo de Almagro. In 1992 Mortensen went to Ireland during a break in shooting, without the consent of the production company, to watch Denmark play in an important match. He is a fan of the New York Mets.

In the Two Towers DVD extras, the film's swordmaster Bob Anderson described Mortensen as "the best swordsman I've ever trained".

In the DVD extras for A History of Violence, David Cronenberg relates that Mortensen is the only actor he'd come across who would come back from weekends with his family having bought items to use as props on the set.

Mortensen is very fond of horses, and shows such in his book The Horse Is Good. In fact, he bought the horse which played Brego in The Lord of the Rings movies (Roheryn in the books), which is Aragorn's steed; as well as TJ, one of the horses who played Hidalgo. He also purchased the stallion that played Arwen's horse, and gave it to the stunt woman who rode the horse in place of Liv Tyler.

He has spoken out against militarism and U.S. foreign policy.

 

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