Short Biography

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

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