Brendan Fraser

Brendan Fraser (born December 3, 1968, Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S.) is an American-Canadian actor who first gained notice when he appeared in the 1992 comedy film Encino Man, portraying a frozen caveman who is thawed out by two high school outcasts and introduced to modern day life. He is also known for his appearances in George of the Jungle (1997), The Mummy trilogy (1999, 2001, and 2008), and, more recently, The Whale (2022), for which he won the Academy Award for best actor.

Early life

Fraser is the youngest of four sons born to Canadian parents Peter Fraser, a foreign services officer for the Canadian Government’s Office of Tourism, and Carol Mary Fraser (née Genereux). Growing up, his family relocated every few years for his father’s job. With dual American-Canadian citizenship, Fraser and his family lived in Ottawa, Indianapolis, Detroit, and Seattle. They also spent time in major cities in other countries, including London, Rome, and The Hague.

Fraser first took an interest in acting during his family’s stay in London in the mid-1970s when he attended West End theater shows, including The Mousetrap, Oliver, and Jesus Christ Superstar. He eventually went on to study acting in college.

Fraser received his early education at a Montessori school in Detroit and at the Sacred Heart School in Bellevue, Washington. He then attended Upper Canada College, a boys’ preparatory boarding school, in Toronto, from which he graduated in 1987. From there, he went on to study acting at Seattle’s Cornish College of the Arts. After graduating in 1990, he moved to Los Angeles and quickly found work in television and, shortly after, in film.

Career

Fraser’s first two minor roles came in 1991 in the television movies Child of Darkness, Child of Light and Guilty Until Proven Innocent. That year he also had a small role in Dogfight, a film that starred River Phoenix and Lili Taylor.

In 1992, alongside Sean Astin and Pauly Shore, Fraser starred as caveman Link in Encino Man. The movie was fairly successful, grossing more than $40 million, and later became one of the most iconic cult classics of the 1990s. In the coming-of-age drama School Ties (1992) he portrayed a star quarterback on a football scholarship at an elite prep school in the 1950s who hides the fact that he is Jewish from his Protestant classmates. The film also featured up-and-coming actors Chris O’Donnell and Matt Damon. Over the next four years he appeared in films including the fantasy comedy Younger and Younger (1993), the comedy With Honors (1994), the mystery thriller The Passion of Darkly Noon (1995), and the romantic comedy Mrs. Winterbourne (1996).

Fraser’s first major box office success came in 1997 when he starred in the Disney film adaptation of the television cartoon series George of the Jungle. The movie went on to gross more than $174 million worldwide and made Fraser a favorite for family audiences. In 1998’s Gods and Monsters, a speculative biopic about the last days of director James Whale’s life, Fraser portrays a young heterosexual gardener who the aging, openly homosexual Whale takes an interest in and a friendship develops between the two.

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In 1999 Fraser starred in Dudley Do-Right, portraying the bungling Canadian mountie in the film adaptation of the television cartoon series. Also that year he introduced the world to adventurer Rick O’Connell in the action-adventure film The Mummy, a role that went on to become one of his most recognizable. The movie spawned sequels, with Fraser reprising his role in The Mummy Returns (2001) and The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008).

Fraser appeared alongside Elizabeth Hurley as a lovestruck dweeb who makes a pact with the devil to snare the girl of his dreams in the remake of the comedy Bedazzled (2000). He returned to dramatic roles portraying a CIA agent in The Quiet American (2002) and a district attorney in Crash (2004), a film which examines race-based misconceptions people have about each other through a series of interweaving stories presented by an ensemble cast. Crash won three Academy Awards, including for best picture, and the cast was awarded the Screen Actors Guild Award for outstanding performance by a cast in a motion picture.

Fraser continued to steadily work in films over the next decade and a half, but in the mid-aught’s his star power began to decline, which he thought might have been a result of his accusing Philip Berk, then president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), of sexual assault in 2003, which Berk denied. Although Fraser didn’t go public with his accusation until 2018, his representatives had asked the HFPA to have Beck send him a written apology after the incident, and Fraser notes that he was rarely invited to the annual Golden Globes award ceremony (which was hosted by the HFPA) after that. Fraser also was preoccupied with several personal issues during those years, including health problems—some of which stemmed from the physicality of his roles, leading to multiple surgeries; his 2007 split and subsequent divorce in 2009 from Afton Smith, whom he had married in 1998; and the death of his mother in 2016 after a lengthy battle with cancer. In the mid-2010s he shifted to television roles, appearing in such shows as Texas Rising (2015) and The Affair (2016–17). Fraser’s career began to bounce back with his role in the biographical drama Trust (2018), portraying the former CIA spy James Fletcher Chace. He was also in all four seasons of the superhero series Doom Patrol (2019–23), playing Cliff “Robotman” Steele.

The role that solidified Fraser’s comeback came in Darren Aronofsky’s film The Whale (2022) with his portrayal of a morbidly obese, gay, online English professor who attempts to reconnect with his rebellious estranged daughter. In addition to winning the Academy Award for best actor for the role in the movie, he also won the Screen Actors Guild Award for best male leading actor. Fraser followed the movie up with the role of a lawyer in Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), directed by Martin Scorsese and based on the true story of the Osage murders in the 1920s. The movie, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, and Lily Gladstone, was nominated for 10 Academy Awards, and its ensemble cast was nominated for a Screen Actors Guild award for outstanding performance by a cast in a motion picture.