Andrew Clement "Andy" Serkis (born 20 April 1964) is an English film actor, director and author.
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Source: Wikipedia

Andrew Clement "Andy" Serkis (born 20 April 1964) is an English film actor, director and author.
He is popularly known for playing through performance capture to animate and voice computer-generated characters: Gollum in The Lord of the Rings film trilogy (2001-2003) and the Hobbit prequels (2012-2014), King Kong in the eponymous 2005 film, Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) and Captain Haddock in Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin (2011).
Andy also earned a Golden Globe Award nomination for his portrayal of Ian Brady in the British television film Longford (2006) and he was BAFTA Award nominated for his portrayal of New Wave and punk musician Ian Dury in the biopic Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll (2010). Serkis' film work in motion capture has been critically acclaimed, especially as Gollum and Caesar, earning him awards from many associations which do not usually recognize motion capture as real acting including an Empire Award, a National Board of Review Award, two Saturn Awards and a Screen Actors Guild Award.

Early life [edit]
Serkis, one of five children, was born and brought up in Ruislip Manor in West London. His mother, Lylie (née Weech), was English and taught disabled and invalid children; his father, Clement Serkis, was an Iraqi gynaecologist of Armenian ethnicity. His ancestors' original surname was Sarkisian. His father often worked away in the Middle East, while he was brought up in Britain, with regular holidays in the Middle East including to Tyre, Sidon, Damascus and Baghdad.
Serkis was educated at St Benedict's School, Ealing, and then started studying visual arts at Lancaster University, choosing theatre as a second subject so he could design posters. Serkis was a member of the County College, and part of the student radio station Bailrigg FM.
As part of the first year of his visual arts course at Lancaster University, Serkis had to choose a secondary subject as part of a broad-range based arts foundation. He chose to study theatre and joined the Nuffield Studio, getting involved designing and producing plays. Having agreed to act in a couple of productions, towards the end of his first year he played the lead role in Barrie Keeffe's play Gotcha, as a rebellious teenager holding a teacher hostage. As a result he changed his major subject in the subsequent two years to acting, constructing his modular Independent Studies Degree around acting, set design studying Stanislavski and Brecht, and minor modules in art and visual graphics.
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