Andy Serkis Pics

Andy

Serkis

20 April 1964

68

Slim

Grey

Brown - Dark

Ruislip, London, England, UK.

Aries

White

Atheist

Gollum in Lord of the Rings Trilogy

Male

British

Andrew C. G. "Andy" Serkis (born 20 April 1964) is an English actor, director and author. He is popularly known for playing Gollum in The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, for which he earned several nominations and the Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. He also earned a Golden Globe Award nomination for his portrayal of Ian Brady in the British television film Longford.

Actor/Actress, Director, Producer

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He was born Andy Serkis on April 20, 1964, in Ruislip Manor, West London, England. He has three sisters and a brother. His father, an ethnic Armenian, named Serkissian, was a Medical Doctor working abroad, in Iraq, and the Serkis family spent a lot of time traveling around the Middle East. For the first ten years of his life Andy Serkis used to go backwards and forwards between Baghdad and London. His mother was busy working as a special education teacher of handicapped children, so Andy and his four siblings were raised with au pairs in the house. Young Andy Serkis wanted to be an artist; he was fond of painting and drawing, and visualized himself working behind the scenes in productions. He attended St. Benedict`s School, a Roman Catholic School for boys at the Benedictine Abbey in London. Serkis studied visual arts at Lancaster University in the north-west of England. There he became involved in mechanical aspects of the theatre and did stage design and set building for theatrical productions. Then Serkis was asked to play a role in a student production, and made his stage debut in Barrie Keefe`s play `Gotcha`; thereafter he switched from stage design to acting, which was a real calling that transformed his life. Instead of going to an acting college, in 1985 Serkis began his professional acting career at the Duke`s Playhouse in Lancaster, where he was given an Equity card and performed in fourteen plays one after another, as an apprentice of Jonathan Petherbridge. After that he worked in touring theatre companies, doing it for no money, fueled by a sense of enthusiasm, moving to a new town every week. He has thus appeared in a host of popular plays and on almost every renowned British stage. In 1989 he appeared in a stage production of Shakespeare`s `Macbeth`, so beginning his long association with the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, where he would return many times to appear in `She Stoops to Conquer`, `Your Home in the West` and the `True Nature of Love` among other plays. In the 1990s Serkis began to make his mark on the London stage, appearing at the Royal Court Theatre as the Fool in `King Lear`, making his interpretation of the Fool as the woman that Lear, a widower, could relate to - a man, in drag, as a Victorian musician. He also appeared as Potts in the hit play `Mojo`, playing in front of full houses and earning huge critical success. In 1987, Serkis made his debut on television, and he acted in several major British TV miniseries throughout the 1990s. In 1999, Andy Serkis landed the prize role of Gollum in Peter Jackson`s epic film trilogy based on J.R.R. Tolkien`s saga `The Lord of the Rings`. He spent four years on the part and received awards and nominations for his performance as Gollum, a computer generated character in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) which won 11 Oscars. Gollum was the collaborative team`s effort around Serkis`s work in performance capture - an art form based on CGI-assisted acting. Serkis`s work was an interactive performance in a skin-tight CGI suit with markers allowing cameras to track and register 3D position for each marker. Serkis` every nuance was picked up by several cameras positioned at precisely calculated angles to allow for the software to see enough information to process the image. The images of Serkis` performances were translated into the digital format by animators at Weta Digital studio in New Zealand. There his image was key-frame animated and then edited into the movie, Serkis did have one scene in the Return of the King showing how he originally had the ring, killing another hobbit to posses it after they found it during a fishing trip. He drew from his three cats clearing fur balls out of their throats to develop the constricted voice he produced for Gollum and Smeagol, and it was also enhanced by sound editing in post-production. Serkis spent almost two years in New Zealand and away from his family, and much of 2002 and 2003 in post-production studios for large periods of time, due to complexity of the creative process of bringing the character of Gollum to the screen. Serkis had to shoot two versions for every scene; one version was with him on camera, acting with (chiefly) Elijah Wood and Sean Astin, which served both to show Wood and Astin the moves so that they could precisely interact with the movements of Gollum, and to provide the CGI artists the subtleties of Gollum`s physical movements and facial expressions for their manual finishing of the animated images. In the other version, he`d do the voice off-camera, as Wood and Astin repeated their movements as though Gollum were there with them; that take would be the basis for inserting the CGI Gollum used in the released movie. In post-production, Serkis was doing motion-capture wearing a skintight motion capture suit with CGI gear while acting as a virtual puppeteer redoing every single scene in the studio. Additional CGI rotomation was done by animators

imdb.com

St Benedict`s School, London, UK

Lancaster University (studied visual art)

www.serkis.com

Andrew C. G. "Andy" Serkis

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Turquoise Eyes

Second Unit Director or Assistant Director, Other Crew

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