Acclaimed for his good looks as much as his searing
acting ability, Canadian actor Ryan Gosling first came
to attention, aged 12 , after beating 15,000 hopefuls to
become a Mouseketeer in Disney's Mickey Mouse Club
alongside Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and Justine
Timberlake. After the show ended, Ryan spent his teenage
years acting in nearly 200 episodes on television,
before landing the lead role in the TV show Young
Hercules. Wanting to move into film, he made his feature
debut in Remember the Titans, a successful Denzel
Washington vehicle. He then found acclaim playing a
'Jewish Nazi' in the controversial, independent film The
Believer, which opened the door to a major role
alongside Sandra Bullock in the thriller Murder By
Numbers. Everything clicked with the 2004 box office hit
The Notebook; it was a film so romantic that Ryan and
his co-star, Rachel McAdams, ended up falling in love
off-screen as well. The film turned Ryan into a
Hollywood pin-up, and in the wake of its success he
famously spent six months working in a Los Angeles
sandwich shop, to regain a sense of perspective. Since
then, he has played one challenging role after another,
including a suicidal young man (Stay), a drug addict
school teacher (Half Nelson), an alienated man whose
only meaningful relationship is with a blow up doll
(Lars and the Real Girl), while inching towards
mainstream success with acclaimed performances in films
like Blue Valentine, Drive, Crazy Stupid Lover and
Gangster Squad. Aged 32, his is now poised to become a
major movie star. Enigmatic and humble, with a legendary
compulsion to lose himself in every role he takes on,
this is the story of an actor who is incredibly close to
his mother, plays in a band, co-owns a Moroccan
restaurant in Beverly Hills, laughs off those who tag
him a sex symbol and who shoulder shrugs at the
widespread conviction that he's this generations Marlon
Brando.
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