This is the story of how that happened, and what it cost, and what it meant.
## The Boy from Indianapolis: Origins of an Unlikely Movie Star
Brendan James Fraser was born on December 3, 1968, in Indianapolis, Indiana, to Canadian parents. His father, Peter Fraser, was a Canadian tourist board executive, and the family’s lifestyle reflected his work: they moved frequently, living in various American cities, Canadian locations, and European postings. It was a peripatetic childhood that gave Fraser fluency in the particular skill of quick adaptation — learning to read rooms, read people, make himself likable to strangers in new places.
He attended Upper Canada College, one of Canada’s most prestigious private schools, in Toronto. The institution has produced a significant number of notable alumni, and the environment was academically rigorous. But the moment that would actually redirect his life came before his Upper Canada years, when he was still a young child in London. A stage production of Oliver! caught something in him. He was drawn to the idea that performers could inhabit other people, become other people, for the duration of a performance. The attraction stayed.
After his schooling in Canada, he enrolled at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, a conservatory with a strong theatre program. He graduated in 1990 and made the move that graduates of serious performing arts programs either make or don’t: he went to Los Angeles.
He was twenty-one years old, and the look he arrived with was extraordinary — physically imposing, conventionally handsome in the broad American movie star tradition, but with something in his eyes and around his mouth that suggested he might be able to do more than the look initially implied. He was six feet, three inches. He had the build of someone who could play an action hero. What the industry would eventually realize was that he could also be funny, genuinely funny, in a physical way that the action hero packaging made unexpected.