Brendan Fraser's smile: Brendan Fraser has a nice smile. We have been a fan since we saw him in George of the Jungle and I'll bet there are thousands who feel the same way.

Beautiful Smile: Try smiling once in a while, it's contagious.

January 14, 2009

By BOB WHITE and CYNDI SMITH
nsnews staff

We wrote this story because Brendan Fraser has a nice smile -no other reason at all. With all the trash in the press these days, it's kind of nice to write about somebody, simply because he or she has a nice smile. Bet if everybody had a smile like Fraser's, the world would be a whole lot better than it is now.

He was born Brendan James Fraser on the 3rd of December, 1968, in Indianapolis, to Canadian parents. The Frasers were an old Canadian family, with strong traditions in education and sport. Indeed, his uncle George had won a gold medal at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics. His father, Peter, had been a journalist and now worked for the Canadian Government's office of tourism. Mother Carol was a sales counsellor, and also looked after Brendan and his three older brothers - Kevin, Sean and Regan. Peter's job took the family all over the world, meaning that, by the age of 13, Brendan had lived in Ottawa, Detroit, Cincinnati, London, Rome, Switzerland, Wassenaar in Holland, and Seattle. While in Holland, aged 7, he hung out with the "army brat" kids of military personnel, and took to calling himself a "Brochure Brat".

By 12, he was in London, and this is where he first made contact with acting. Seeing a matinee of Oliver in the West End, he was immediately taken with the thrill of it all. When his parents then chose to settle in Seattle, young Brendan quickly joined the chorus of a school production of Oklahoma! In the 8th Grade at the Sacred Heart school in Redmond, a suburb of Seattle, he would play Captain Corcoran in HMS Pinafore. He remembers this as a real turning point. Making a grand entrance, he tossed his cape high in the air, only for it to land on his head. The audience, naturally, burst into laughter. What was he to do? Would he give in to embarrassment and walk off, or would he brave it out and continue? Recognising that, despite the laughter, he was having a great time, he went on. And has kept going on ever since.

At 13, Brendan had been sent to the Upper Canada College in Toronto, a prestigious boarding school. Here, though his academic averages were not good, he would work in the school's little theatre, appearing in plays and revues, and acting as stage manager and ticket seller. Before his final year, though, Peter opted to leave his government office, thus losing Brendan's tuition subsidy and bringing the boy back to Seattle. Here Brendan, having decided that acting was to be his thing, would enrol at the Cornish College of the Arts, his degree emphasising physical performance. One major influence on the boy would be actor, clown and pantomimist Bill Irwin, who'd appeared in Eight Men Out and Robert Altman's Popeye. Sneaking into Irwin's show, The Regard Of Flight, Brendan was hugely impressed by an act that was funny, complex and impossible to categorise. Fraser decided there and then that he, too, would be more than just an actor.

Cornish was a high-class and fairly elitist establishment that taught theatre acting and frowned upon cinema, an attitude that Brendan picked up but did not hold onto for long. Onstage, he starred in The Marriage Of Bette And Boo. By 1991, his list of credits would be impressive. Having graduated in 1990, as a Bachelor of Fine Arts, he took a year-long internship at the Intiman Theatre, and was also a member of the Laughing Horse Summer Theatre. Thus, by his early twenties, he'd already appeared in such classics as Romeo And Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Three Sisters, Arms And The Man, The King Stag and The Madwoman Of Chaillot. Hard to believe that George Of the Jungle has such a classical background.

Eventually, though, the movies came to him. Casting director Sharon Bialy was in town, scouting for a film to be called Bound By Honour. Brendan auditioned, but wasn't right for the Latino kid role she hoped to fill (in fact, the film was never made). However, she did notice that this "very shy, very gawky" boy seemed to come alive during the reading and she suggested he visit her if he ever came to Los Angeles. Perhaps she could introduce him to some agents, find him some auditions.

Brendan decided to give it a go. Turning down a second year's internship at the Intiman, and also a Master of Fine Arts degree at the Southern Methodist University in Dallas, in January 1991 he borrowed his mother's car and took off for the City of Angels.

Finding work straight away, he made his debut in Dogfight. Set in 1963, this concerned a group of young Marines spending their last night in San Francisco before departing for Vietnam. Boys being boys, they arrange a "dogfight", a competition to see who can bring the ugliest girl to a party. The star, River Phoenix, picks on waitress Lili Taylor but, of course, discovers that she's actually quite beautiful. Brendan had a brief, one-line part as a sailor. But what a line it was - "How would you like to eat my shit?"