Sydney, Australia, the birthplace for many a fine actor, is also home for Hugh Jackman, who was born in New South Wales on October 12th, 1968. The youngest of five children, Jackman pursued acting throughout childhood but majored in journalism at the University of Technology at Sydney.
With a love for the stage that he could not ignore, Jackman turned toward the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts to hone his skills. His teachers recognized something great in him, and it seems they were right, as he received a lead role in the Australian television drama Corelli in 1995. Jackman met his future wife, actress Deborra-Lee Furness, on the set of the show. They were married in February 1996, shortly after what Jackman claims was love at first sight.

The role in Corelli led to big things for Jackman: He followed it up with two films in 1999, Paperback Hero and Erskineville Kings. He took to the stage as Gaston in the Australian production of Beauty and the Beast, which is how Jackman discovered that he had potential singing talent; he perfected his skills by hiring a singing coach after he landed the role.

After starring in an Australian production of Sunset Boulevard, he was cast as Curly in the London production of Oklahoma!, which is what caught the attention of X-Men director Bryan Singer. Mission: Impossible 2’s Dougray Scott was originally cast as Logan/Wolverine, but had to be replaced due to scheduling conflicts. Singer found his Wolverine in Jackman.

Like most actors, it would take one big break for Jackman to make it across the ocean in Hollywood. The popularity of 2000’s X-Men translated into huge exposure for Jackman, who now had the privilege of choosing between several scripts that were incessantly arriving at his front door. He received a Breakthrough Performance nomination at the MTV Movie Awards in recognition of his feat.

The 2001 romantic-comedy Someone Like You came next and proved that he was capable of more than just a tough-guy role, turning on the charm for Ashley Judd as a womanizer. Swordfish, the high-impact action thriller that received lukewarm reviews, featured Hugh Jackman as a hacker alongside John Travolta and Halle Berry. Three movies into a Hollywood career, and Jackman was already deep in stardom.

The 2001 holiday season brought with it the romantic comedy Kate & Leopold, with Jackman playing a 19th century duke thrust into present-day New York City. In a role that required Jackman to learn how to ride a horse and charm the hell out of leading lady Meg Ryan, his performance once again did not go unnoticed as the Hollywood Foreign Press nominated him in the Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy category.

With roles in the short film Standing Room Only, directed by his wife and released in 2002, and the much-hyped X-Men 2 (also called X2) to be released in early 2003, Jackman has not let up one bit. He has succeeded at maintaining his modesty and impeccable demeanor throughout his (so far) brief but impressive career in North America. With films like Van Helsing in the works, there is no slowing this man down.

Despite all the activity, his wife and adopted son Oscar Maximillian are always in his thoughts — they are the first thing he mentions whenever questioned about his priorities in life. Hugh Jackman could very well be the next Hollywood untarnished hero that we have been waiting for, as he certainly fits the mold.

If Harrison Ford had listened to the advice of studio heads early in his career, he would have remained a carpenter and never gone on to star in some of Hollywood’s biggest films and become one of the industry’s most bankable stars. Born July 13, 1942 in Chicago and raised in a middle-class suburb, he led an average childhood. An introverted loner, he was popular with girls but was picked on by school bullies. Ford quietly endured their everyday tortures until he one day lost his cool and beat the tar out of the gang leader responsible for his being repeatedly thrown off an embankment. He had no special affinity for films and usually only went to see them on dates because they were inexpensive and dark. Following high school graduation, Ford studied English and philosophy at Ripon College in Wisconsin. An admittedly lousy student, he began acting while in college and then worked briefly in summer stock. He was expelled from the school three days before graduation because he did not complete his required thesis.
In the mid-60s Ford and his first wife (his college sweetheart) moved to Hollywood, where he signed as a contract player with Columbia and then Universal. After debuting onscreen in a bit as a bellboy in Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round (1966), he played secondary roles, typically as a cowboy, in several films of the late ’60s and in such TV series as Gunsmoke, The Virginian, and Ironside. Discouraged with both the roles he was getting and his difficulty in providing for his young family, he abandoned acting and taught himself carpentry via library books borrowed from the local library. Using his recently purchased run-down Hollywood home for practice, Ford proved himself a talented woodworker and, after successfully completing his first contract to build an out-building for Sergio Mendez, found himself in demand with other Hollywood residents (it was also during this time that Ford acquired his famous scar, the result of a minor car accident).

Meanwhile, Ford’s luck as an actor began to change when a casting-director friend for whom he was doing some construction helped him get a part in George Lucas’s American Graffiti (1973). The film which became an unexpected blockbuster and greatly increased Ford’s familiarity. Many audience members, particularly women, responded to his turn as the gruffly macho Bob Falfa, the kind of subtly charismatic portrayal that would later become Ford’s trademark.

However, Ford’s career remained stagnant until Lucas cast him as space-pilot Han Solo in the mega-hit Star Wars (1977), after which he became a minor star. He spent the remainder of the 1970s trapped in mostly forgettable films (such as the comedy-western The Frisco Kid with Gene Wilder), although he did manage to land the small role of Colonel G. Lucas in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979).

The early 1980s elevated Ford to major stardom with the combined impact of The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and his portrayal of action-adventure hero Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), which proved to be an enormous hit. He went on to play ‘Indy’ twice more, in 1984’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). Ford moved beyond popular acclaim with his role as a big-city police detective who finds himself masquerading as an Amish farmer to protect a young murder witness in Witness (1984). Ford received a Best Actor Oscar nomination for his work, as well as the praise of critics who had previously ignored his acting ability.

Having appeared in several of the biggest money-makers of all time, Ford was able to pick and choose his roles in the ’80s and ’90s. Following the success of Witness, Ford re-teamed with the film’s director, Peter Weir, to make a film adaptation of Paul Theroux’s novel The Mosquito Coast. The film met with mixed critical results, and audiences largely stayed away, unused to the idea of their hero playing a markedly flawed and somewhat insane character. Undeterred, Ford went on to choose projects that brought him further departure from the action films responsible for his reputation. In 1988 he worked with two of the industry’s most celebrated directors, Roman Polanski and Mike Nichols. With Polanski he made Frantic, a dark psychological thriller that fared poorly with critics and audiences alike. He had greater success with Nichols, his director in Working Girl, a saucy comedy in which he co-starred with Melanie Griffith and Sigourney Weaver. The film was a hit, and displayed Ford’s largely unexploited comic talent.

Ford began the 1990s with Alan J. Pakula’s courtroom thriller Presumed Innocent, which he followed with another Mike Nichols outing, Regarding Henry (1991). The film was an unmitigated flop among critics and audiences alike, a disappointment Ford allayed the following year when he signed an unprecedented $50 million contract to play CIA agent Jack Ryan in a series of five films based on the novels of Tom Clancy. The first two films of the series, Patriot Games (1992) and Clear and Present Danger (1994) met with an overwhelming success mirrored by that of Ford’s turn as Dr. Richard Kimball in The Fugitive (1993). Ford’s next effort, Sydney Pollack’s 1995 remake of Sabrina, did not meet similar success, and this bad luck continued with The Devil’s Own (which reunited him with Pakula), despite Ford’s seemingly fault-proof pairing with Brad Pitt. However, his other 1997 effort, Wolfgang Petersen’s Air Force One, more than made up for the critical and commercial shortcomings of his past two films, proving that Ford, even at 55 years of age, was still a bonafide, butt-kicking action hero.

Ford, who does not like doing interviews and maintains a strict privacy regarding his personal life, makes a home with his second wife, screenwriter Melissa Mathison, whose credits include E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982). They live quietly with their two children Malcolm and Georgia (Ford’s other children, two sons from his first marriage, are grown and have chosen careers outside of show business) in New York City and on an 800-acre ranch near Jackson Hole, Wyoming. A devoted husband and father, Ford has a clause in his movie contracts permitting him to bring his family with him for location shooting.
What Lies Beneath (2000)
Random Hearts (1999)
Wolfgang Petersen 3-Pack (1999)
Six Days, Seven Nights (1998)
Air Force One (1997)
Air Force One/The Devil’s Own (1997)
The Devil’s Own (1997)
Sabrina (1995)
Clear and Present Danger (1994)
The Fugitive (1993)
Patriot Games (1992)
Regarding Henry (1991)
Presumed Innocent (1990)
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)
Working Girl (1988)
Frantic (1987)
The Mosquito Coast (1986)
Witness (1985)
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)
Return of the Jedi (1983)
Blade Runner (1982)
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
Apocalypse Now (1979)
The Frisco Kid (1979)
Hanover Street (1979)
Force 10 From Navarone (1978)
Heroes (1977)
The Possessed (1977)
Star Wars (1977)
The Conversation (1974)
American Graffiti (1973)
Getting Straight (1970)
Luv (1967)
Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round (1966)

Hugh Grant, Actor. Born September 9, 1960, in London, England. Grant had a modest upbringing in West London; his father ran a carpet business and his mother was a teacher. A bright and scholarly youth, Hugh attended Oxford as an English major, but turned to acting as a creative outlet in his final year. In 1982, Grant made his screen debut in Privileged while still a student. He went on to do theatre and television work, but it was not until 1987’s Merchant-Ivory production of Maurice that Grant received international recognition. He won the Venice Film Festival’s Best Actor Prize for his portrayal of a young man confronting his homosexuality at the turn-of-the-century.

Although Grant went on to play more memorable roles as the terminally shy and sickly Chopin in James Lapine’s Impromptu and as a journalist in 1993’s James Ivory production of The Remains of the Day with Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, it was his next role in 1994’s Four Weddings and a Funeral that propelled him to Hollywood stardom. Richard Curtis, a friend of Grant’s and a Four Weddings’ writer, wrote the part with him in mind, so Grant embodied the character with charismatic grace and ease. His portrayal of a young, charmingly disheveled aristocrat who falls for a glamorous American, played by Andie MacDowell, appealed to audiences everywhere and made him an international star. Grant met his longtime girlfriend, Elizabeth Hurley, in 1987 while working on Rowing in the Wind in Madrid. He was playing Lord Byron and she, Claire Clairmont. They went on to form the development company Simian Films together, in partnership with Castle Rock Entertainment. Their first production, the medical thriller Extreme Measures, achieved neither critical nor box office recognition.

In 1995, Grant, apparently determined to test the show biz maxim that there is no such thing as bad publicity, was arrested off Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood with a prostitute named Divine Brown. Grant pleaded guilty to lewd conduct; however, he managed to deflect the barrage of negative press through his characteristic self-effacing wit, laughing off the incident on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Both Grant’s career and his relationship with Hurley survived the sordid incident, although Hurley said at first that Grant should be “horsewhipped.” Also in 1995, Grant appeared as Edward Ferrars in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and as a neurotic father-to-be in Chris’ Columbus’ Nine Months. He also continued to work on non-Hollywood productions including Sirens, An Englishman Who Went Up a Hill but Came Down a Mountain, and the British comedy An Awfully Big Adventure, directed by Mike Newell.

After several years away from the Hollywood spotlight, Grant returned to the big screen with 1999’s Notting Hill, written and produced by the Four Wedding and a Funeral team and co-starring Julia Roberts. The British/American combination proved an infallible recipe once again, and Notting Hill was a box office success. Grant’s other 1999 projects included Mickey Blue Eyes, which is the second release from Simian Films.

Women love his stuttering British charm so much, and think that he’s so cute, that they seem to have forgiven, or forgotten, the fact that he was once arrested in LA for getting caught with a prostitute named Divine Brown. There are even those cynics amongst us who would believe the whole thing was a publicity stunt for his then movie Nine Months. Grant was born in London on September 9th, 1960. He attended Oxford University and while there landed his first film job in 1982′s Privileged. He followed that with work on British TV (Jenny’s War, The Last Place on Earth) and theatre.

He made his way back on to the big screen again in 1987, appearing in the Merchant/Ivory film Maurice. The film was quite successful and Hugh appeared in several critically acclaimed films of the British cinema. He often played aristocratic roles and perhaps the aristocracy were the only people going to the films as they weren’t always winners at the box office. Some of the highlights from that period include the Ken Russell film Lair of the White Worm, Impromptu, and Roman Polanski’s erotic Bitter Moon. He again returned to the Merchant/Ivory stable when he appeared in 1993′s Remains of the Day and received good notices for his work in Sirens. He also managed to squeeze in some Stateside TV fare, working opposite Julie Andrews in the Judith Krantz mini-series ‘Till We Meet Again.

1994. Kaboom. Grant exploded into international stardom when he appeared opposite Andie MacDowell in the English romantic comedy Four Weddings and a Funeral. The film was nominated for an Academy Award and Grant won a Golden Globe for the Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Comedy/Musical. We move on to 1995. Hugh appeared in several movies including Restoration, An Awfully Big Adventure, The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain, Nine Months and Sense and Sensibility. All of that work was overshadowed by another picture of Hugh’s: his arrest photo that was taken when he was caught with an LA hooker.

Girlfriend Elizabeth Hurley forgave him enough to produce his next picture, Extreme Measures, in which he co-starred with Gene Hackman. Then again, maybe producing gave her a great chance to boss him around a bit…Three years seperated that film and Notting Hill. He then let Hurley produce him again, this time in Mickey Blue Eyes. On December 20th, 1999, Hugh was nominated for the 57th Annual Golden Globe Awards for his role in Notting Hill.

In an announcement made through their film company, Simian Films, on May 23rd, 2000, Hugh Grant and Elizabeth Hurley announced that they were splitting up after 13 years together. The statement went on to say that the decision was mutual and that no third parties were involved. 2000 wasn’t all that bad though, as earlier in the year he did get to work with his idol, Woody Allen, in Small Time Crooks. He made Bridget Jones′s Diary in 2001 and received great reviews for About A Boy in 2002.

Edward Regan Murphy was born April 3, 1961, and raised in Long Island in a middle-class community. He lost his father, a Brooklyn policeman, when he was only eight years old. His sense of humor was ever-present as a child, however, and he was the proverbial class clown in school. Voted the most popular student at his high school, Murphy was a comedic prodigy, performing for money at the age of fifteen. By eighteen, he was a headline act on the circuit. A year later he passed an audition to appear on the NBC cult hit Saturday Night Live. The show was struggling to survive at the time, having lost most of the original cast, as well as founder and producer Lorne Michaels. His talent earned him a regular slot on the program, as well as a loyal following. Murphy had a rapport with the camera and live audience that was astonishing for someone his age. His characters became legendary, from Buckwheat and Gumby to Mr. Robinson and James Brown. It did not take long for Hollywood to take notice of his genius. His first film, 48 Hrs., was a surprise hit that established him as a future star of the silver screen. Another hit followed, Trading Places, along with his classic routine in Delirious. Murphy was everywhere at the time, from film to a successful comedy album that earned him a Grammy. But his fame did not skyrocket until he was given his own vehicle to star in. The film was 1984’s Beverly Hills Cop and it transformed his career forever. It went on to become one of the most successful films of all-time when it was released, and made Murphy rich. No matter what Murphy did during the rest of the decade, he had the Midas touch. Even a mediocre film like The Golden Child in 1986 made a fortune at the box office. A sequel to Cop was a hit as well and he proved he still had the stand-up gift in Raw. Over the next several years, only Coming to America was able to generate considerable revenue at the box office. His foray into directing with Harlem Nights was a flop and he made many forgettable films that could not replicate his past glory. All of that changed with the 1996 remake of The Nutty Professor. The film featured Murphy at his manic best as the alter ego Buddy Love. Another remake, Dr. Dolittle, introduced Murphy to a new legion of fans. He has since scored big with sequels to both and vocal roles in the animated hits Mulan and Shrek. Critical praise was doled out with an unusual performance in Bowfinger. If anything, Murphy has proven that he is still a reliable Hollywood asset and has no shortage of work in the future. He starred in the film Showtime with Robert De Niro and Rene Russo, and can be seen in The Adventures of Pluto Nash and another remake — of a television show this time — I Spy. Murphy and his wife of nine years, Nicole Mitchell, are the parents of four children.

Ed Harris is an impressive guy — in 1995 alone, he plumbed the depths of human depravity as Just Cause (1995)’s brutal serial killer, soared to the heights of heroism in Apollo 13 (1995), and reincarnated enigmatic conspirator E. Howard Hunt for Nixon (1995). His square-jawed, clear-eyed, rugged good looks are straight out of a Marlboro ad. He is intense, meticulous, and hard-working. But perhaps the most impressive thing about Ed Harris is that he has made a name for himself in Hollywood despite the fact that a) he almost never gets to play the lead; and b) he has lost most of his hair. Surely, that explains how fame eluded him for so long.

A two-sport star in high school (he was a catcher for the baseball team and fullback for the football team), Harris led his gridiron teammates to a league championship his senior year. His football prowess won him a scholarship to attend Columbia University. In 1971, after his sophomore year, Harris’s interest in football waned, and he dropped out to follow his parents westward to Oklahoma. He enrolled at Oklahoma University, where he developed an interest in theatre, first as a spectator and later as a participant. Harris honed his skills for a year in O.U.’s drama program, and then quit school to pursue acting. A string of small parts in local theatre led, finally, to a big part in local theatre: he played King Arthur in a production of “Camelot,” and won his first standing ovation. Convinced that he had discovered the path his life was meant to follow, Harris made the leap so many others had before him: he moved to Los Angeles. With the objective of beefing up his résumé and refining his abilities, Harris entered the California Institute of the Arts, which granted him a fine-arts degree in 1975. Over the course of the next several years he compiled an impressive list of stage credits — including roles in “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “The Grapes of Wrath” — but as far as the I.R.S. was concerned, he was a house painter. His first sizable film role, as a killer, came in the Charles Bronson vehicle Borderline (1980), and he followed up by reprising his King Arthur — this time on a Harley — as the lead in a cult fave, Knightriders (1981). Neither film scored at the box office, and Harris returned to the stage for a year before snaring the role of astro-pioneer John Glenn (III) in 1983’s Right Stuff, The (1983). Though the film was only a modest success commercially, the critics raved over Harris’s performance; he even made the cover of Newsweek, and Hollywood took a long, thoughtful look at the blue-eyed Jersey boy. Unfortunately, the middling financial returns for Right Stuff, The (1983) proved to be the high-water mark among his projects, which typically were well-reviewed but rarely played to packed houses. “To be in a film that’s in theatres for more than two weeks would be a milestone,” he ruefully observed at one point. His most visible roles came in supporting parts in films whose commercial successes were inevitably credited to other actors (Places in the Heart (1984), Swing Shift (1984)), and the movies in which he took on starring roles were commercial duds (Code Name: Emerald (1985), Sweet Dreams (1985)). The notable exception came in 1989, when Harris received top billing in director James Cameron’s underwater extraterrestrial flick Abyss, The (1989). A late-summer hit, the film marked a special-effects revolution (in it, Cameron introduced the famous morphing effects he later used in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)), and Harris delivered a characteristically complex performance. But even this career jump-start had its lingering disappointments: its enormous budget made Abyss, The (1989) a financial loser in the final tally. Since Abyss, The (1989), Harris has been most successful taking on smaller roles in films supported by the drawing power of other actors. He smoldered with righteous indignation in 1992’s Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), cast with Al Pacino, Alec Baldwin, and Jack Lemmon, and the next year was chilling as a double-dealing F.B.I. agent in the Tom Cruise vehicle Firm, The (1993). In 1995, Harris nailed the role of Mission Control director Gene Kranz in director Ron Howard’s astronaut homage Apollo 13 (1995), and was deservedly Oscar-nominated for his performance. The buzz from Apollo 13 (1995) was so favorable that Harris was billed above the title with co-stars Nicolas Cage and Sean Connery in ads for the 1996 summer action-thriller Rock, The (1996). In 1997, Harris teamed up with Clint Eastwood, Scott Glenn, and Gene Hackman in the presidential scandal film Absolute Power (1997). The following year witnessed his Oscar-nominated turn as the megalomaniacal orchestrator of Jim Carrey’s televised existence in director Peter Weir’s brilliant drama Truman Show, The (1998), as well as a less demanding assignment as a divorced man caught in the middle of the tense interplay between his ex-wife and his much younger girlfriend in Stepmom (1998). Harris’ intense performance in 2000’s Pollock (2000), which he also directed, garnered him a much-deserved Best Actor Oscar nomination. Harris is married to actress Amy Madigan, whom he met in 1981, when both were appearing in a Los Angeles production of “Prairie Avenue.” They began a romance which survived a second collaboration, Places in the Heart (1984), in 1983, and which led to their marriage shortly thereafter. The happy couple has since worked together on four other occasions (Alamo Bay (1985), Riders of the Purple Sage (1996) (TV), the Ken Burns (I) documentary “Baseball” (1994) (mini), and Pollock (2000)), and in 1993 they co-produced a baby girl.