He was born Andy Serkis on April 20, 1964, in Ruislip, West London, England. He has three sisters and a brother. His father 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 made stage design and set building for theatrical productions. At that time Serkis was asked to play in a student production, making his stage debut in Barrie Keefe's play 'Gotcha', and 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 Dukes Playhouse in Lancaster, where he was given an equity card and performed in fourteen plays on the trot 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, and has appeared in a host of popular plays and on almost every renowned British stage. In 1989 he appeared in a stage production of the Shakespeare's 'Macbeth', beginning his long association with the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, where he would return many times to appear in such plays as '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 acted in several major British 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 is the collaborative team's effort around Serkis' work a Performance Capture - an art form based on CGI-assisted acting. Serkis' every nuance was translated into the digital form by animators at Weta Digital studio, where his image was keyframe animated and then edited into the movie, so Serkis himself never appeared on-screen. He drew from his three cats clearing fur out of their throats to develop his constricted voice for Gollum and Smeagol, and it was also enhanced by in post-production. Serkis spent almost two years away in New Zealand and away from his family, and much of 2002 and 2003 in post-production for large periods of time due to complexity of creative process of bringing the character of Gollum to the screen. Serkis had to shoot two versions - one with him on camera acting with Elijah Woodand Sean Astin, and then he'd do the voice off-camera and also had to show Elijah Woodand Sean Astin the moves so that they could mime precisely exact moments. In post-production he was doing motion-capture wearing a skintight motion capture suit with CGI gear while acting as a virtual puppeteer redoing every single scene in the studio. Additional CGI rotomation was done by animators using the human eye instead of the computer to capture the subtleties of Serkis' performance. Serkis also used this art-form in his performance as Kong in King Kong (2005), which won him a Toronto Film Critics Association Award (2005) for his unprecedented work helping to realize the main character in King Kong, and a Visual Effects Society Award (2006) for Outstanding Animated Character in a Live Action Motion Picture. Serkis appears as Alley in The Prestige (2006). He is billed as Vincent Van Gogh in the sixth episode of the new series about artists on BBC 2. Serkis stars as King Bothan on 'Heavenly Sword', a Playstation 3 title, for which he is providing a basis for his in-game face and also acts as a dramatic director on the project which is planned for release in 2007. Andy Serkis has been married to actress and singer Lorraine Ashbourne, and the couple has three children, a daughter, Ruby, and two sons, Sonny and Louis George (born June 19, 2004). Andy Serkis is a pesco-vegetarian. Since his school years at Lancaster, being so close to the Lake District, Serkis developed his other passion outside of his acting profession - mountaineering. Serkis has been active in charitable causes, such as The Hope Foundation which provides essential life-saving medical aid for children suffering from Leukaemia and from countries devastated by war. In October 2006 he was a presenter at the first annual British Academy Video Games Awards at the Roundhouse, London. Andy Serkis is currently residing with his family in North London, England.