Biography

Michael Ironside (born Frederick Reginald Ironside February 12, 1950 in Toronto, Ontario) is a Canadian character actor. He has also worked as a producer, film director, and screenwriter in movie and television series in various Canadian and American works. He is best known for playing villains or "tough guy" heroes, though he has also portrayed sympathetic characters and he is considered one of Canada's most in-demand actors.

He first came to notice in the Canadian sci-fi horror classic Scanners in which he played the mind-controlling, head-blowing megalomaniac Daryl Revok, which led to a dynamic, infamous career of out-and-out baddies or edgy anti-heroes. His breakthrough role was in the television miniseries V: The Final Battle as Ham Tyler. He then cemented his ability to play the intimidating non-compromising character in Top Gun and then Total Recall where he has a memorable final fight scene with Arnold Schwarzenegger. He was also tapped to replace Roy Scheider as captain of the high-tech submarine seaQuest in the third season of "seaQuest DSV" as Captain Oliver Hudson. However, NBC cancelled the series after only thirteen episodes with Ironside as the star.

He has recently become a major star in the realm of video games, as he has voiced Tom Clancy's character of Sam Fisher in the Splinter Cell games, along with the PSP game Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Essentials. Ironside has recently signed a 5 year deal to portray Captian Jonas Trager in the Spaceworks Television scifi series, Ice Planet, as well as the video game.

Ironside is a method actor who keeps in character between takes.

He has a daughter, Adrienne, from a previous marriage and has been married to model Karen Dimwiddle since 1986. They have Has a daughter Findlay (born 1998).

An interesting piece of Ironside trivia is Ironside's success as an arm wrestler in his teenage years. It is not known if he still practises the sport.

He was for some time attached to play the title role in RoboCop (1987), but the crew had to give up on the idea when they realized that he would have to have a much smaller frame to fit into the costume envisaged.