Born in Indianapolis, Indiana, on December 3, 1968, Brendan Fraser is an American-Canadian actor best known for his role in the comedy Encino Man in 1992. He portrayed a frozen caveman in the film who is introduced to modern life after being thawed out by two outcasts from high school. For his parts in George of the Jungle (1997), The Mummy trilogy (1999, 2001, and 2008), and most recently, The Whale (2022), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor, Fraser gained widespread recognition.
Brendan Fraser is the youngest of four sons born to Canadian parents, Carol Mary Fraser (née Genereux) and Peter Fraser, a foreign service officer employed by the Canadian government’s tourism agency. Brendan Fraser and his family, who were dual nationals of the United States and Canada, resided in a number of places, including Ottawa, Indianapolis, Detroit, and Seattle. They also traveled to important foreign places including The Hague, Rome, and London.
During family vacations to London in the middle of the 1970s, Brendan Fraser saw West End productions including The Mousetrap, Oliver!, and Jesus Christ Superstar, which sparked his interest in acting. He was motivated to take acting seriously in college by this early experience.
He attended the Sacred Heart School in Bellevue, Washington, after receiving his early education in a Montessori school in Detroit. After that, he enrolled in Toronto’s Upper Canada College, a boys’ preparatory residential school, where he graduated in 1987. Brendan Fraser pursued his education by majoring in acting at the Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle. He relocated to Los Angeles after graduating in 1990, where he quickly started getting parts in television and later movies.
In 1991, Brendan Fraser made his television debut in two minor roles: Guilty Until Proven Innocent and Child of Darkness, Child of Light. He played a little part in River Phoenix and Lili Taylor’s Dogfight that same year.
Brendan Fraser played the caveman “Link” in the 1992 film Encino Man, costarring with Sean Astin and Pauly Shore. The movie made over $40 million in revenue and went on to become a cult favorite of the 1990s. He played a Jewish star quarterback who conceals his identity at a prestigious prep school in the 1950s in the same year’s film School Ties. Matt Damon and Chris O’Donnell, two up-and-coming performers at the time, were also in the movie.
Brendan Fraser starred in a number of movies over the course of the following four years, including the romantic comedy Mrs. Winterbourne (1996), the mystery thriller The Passion of Darkly Noon (1995), the fantasy comedy Younger and Younger (1993), and the comedy With Honors (1994).
Fraser achieved his first major box office success in 1997 with Disney’s live-action adaptation of George of the Jungle, based on the classic cartoon series. The movie grossed over $174 million worldwide and made Fraser a favorite among family audiences.
In 1998, he starred in Gods and Monsters, a fictionalized biopic based on the final days of director James Whale. Fraser played a young heterosexual gardener who befriends the aging, openly gay Whale.
That same year, he introduced audiences to the adventurous character Rick O’Connell in The Mummy (1999), one of his most iconic roles. The film’s success spawned two sequels — The Mummy Returns (2001) and The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008) — with Fraser reprising his role in both.
Brendan Fraser costarred alongside Elizabeth Hurley in the 2000 comedy Bedazzled, which was a reimagining of the story of a man who strikes a bargain with the devil in order to win his ideal girl. Later, he went back to playing serious parts, including a district attorney in Crash (2004) and a CIA agent in The Quiet American (2002). Crash, which went on to win three Academy Awards, including Best Picture, examined racial tensions and prejudices through a series of linked vignettes. A Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance was also given to the ensemble cast.
Brendan Fraser’s star power started to wane by the mid-2000s, but he continued to work consistently in movies for the next fifteen years. Later, he said that his 2003 complaint of sexual harassment against Philip Berk, the then-president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), which Berk refuted, might have contributed to this drop. Fraser’s counsel asked the HFPA to provide a written apology following the event, even though he did not make his claim public until 2018. After that, Fraser claimed, he was hardly ever invited to the HFPA’s annual Golden Globe Awards.
Fraser also had to deal with personal difficulties during this time, such as health problems brought on by the physical demands of his roles, which necessitated several surgeries; separation from actress Afton Smith in 2007 and subsequent divorce from her in 2009 (they had been married in 1998); and the death of his mother from cancer in 2016 following a protracted illness.
Fraser started concentrating more on television in the middle of the 2010s, making appearances in programs like Texas Rising (2015) and The Affair (2016–17). With his portrayal of former CIA agent James Fletcher Chace in the biographical drama Trust (2018), his career started to pick up steam. In all four seasons of the superhero series Doom Patrol (2019–23), he played Cliff “Robotman” Steele.
In Darren Aronofsky’s 2022 film The Whale, Fraser made his real comeback as a reclusive, obese, gay English professor attempting to make amends with his estranged daughter. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor and received praise from critics for the performance.
Fraser made an appearance in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), which was based on the actual Osage killings of the 1920s, after The Whale. In the movie, he portrayed a lawyer alongside Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, and Lily Gladstone. The film’s ensemble cast was nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance, and it got ten Academy Award nominations.