The Celebrity Face

Ryan Thomas Gosling (born November 12, 1980) is an Academy Award, Golden Globe and two-time Screen Actors Guild award-nominated Canadian actor. He is best known for his roles in The Notebook, Half Nelson, and Lars and the Real Girl.

Early life

Ryan Gosling was born in London, Ontario, and raised in the small city of Cornwall, the son of Donna, a secretary, and Thomas Gosling, a paper mill worker. His parents, who were Mormons, divorced when he was young. He had difficulty in school and often engaged in fights with fellow students. On an appearance on the late night Canadian talk show Open Mike with Mike Bullard, Gosling told of how he was bullied in elementary school (he attended East Front Public School in Cornwall). His mother withdrew him from school and taught him at home from the age of ten. While Gosling’s mother was Mormon, he was not raised in a strictly devout household and never really identified with Mormonism. After returning to the public system he went to Cornwall Collegiate and Vocational School. The family then relocated to Burlington, Ontario, where Ryan attended Lester B. Pearson High School (Burlington). Gosling dropped out at age seventeen.

When Gosling first came to live in Los Angeles in 1997, he was given a place to stay at the West Hollywood apartment of Director Ron Oliver (Goosebumps & Breaker High).

Career

Gosling has had no formal training as an actor. His first acting experience was in the 1990s revival of The Mickey Mouse Club, for which he auditioned on a whim at the age of thirteen. As a result, he appeared in the show alongside Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera JC Chasez and Justin Timberlake in the show’s sixth and seventh seasons. Later he appeared in other television series including Young Hercules, and Ron Oliver’s Goosebumps and Breaker High. His fame spread to the United States after he starred in the 2001 controversial drama The Believer, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. This success led to future films including Remember the Titans, The Slaughter Rule, and Murder by Numbers. Because of his turn as the romantic lead in the 2004 film The Notebook, Gosling was named one of People magazine’s Fifty Hottest Bachelors and the Show West Male Star of Tomorrow.

In preparation for his role as Dan Dunne, a drug-addicted, junior high school history teacher in the 2006 film Half Nelson, Gosling moved to Brooklyn, shadowed a middle school teacher, and studied the Civil Rights Movement (a subject with which his character is fascinated). In March 2007, Gosling won the Best Actor category at the Spirit Awards (formerly known as the Independent Spirit Awards) for his role in the movie. For the same role he was nominated for an Academy Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and a Broadcast Film Critics Association award as best actor. He also became the first Mickey Mouse Club member to be nominated for an Oscar.

Recently Gosling has starred in the film Fracture alongside Anthony Hopkins. He was to begin filming for The Lovely Bones in October 2007, but has since been replaced by Mark Wahlberg. It was subsequently reported that director Peter Jackson fired him because he was "too demanding" A few days later, however, Gosling denied these claims, explaining that his young age was behind the decision to replace him in the film. He said, "The age of the character versus my real age was always a concern of mine. Peter and I tried to make it work and ultimately it just didn’t. I think the film is much better off with Mark Wahlberg in that role. Peter Jackson is an incredible filmmaker and I’m here to tell you that he has things up his sleeve that are going to blow people’s minds. I’m going to be the first person in line to buy tickets." In 2007, Gosling was invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Gosling made a surprise cameo appearance onstage at the Sacred Fools Theatre in Hollywood in the serialized play "Darque Magick" from writer/director Jenelle Riley. For months, the lead character in "Darque Magick" had been making references to his obsession with Gosling, finally culminating in the actor appearing in a videotaped plea for the character to return his dog.

On December 13, 2007, Gosling was nominated for Golden Globe Award for Best Actor - Motion Picture Musical or Comedy for Lars and the Real Girl. A week later, he was subsequently nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award. He had also received a Broadcast Film Critics Association nomination and won a Satellite Award for this performance as well. In February 2008, he was presented with the inaugural Independent Award at the Santa Barbara Film Festival. In her introduction, presenter Jenelle Riley called him "the most consistent and compelling actor working today."

On January 12th, 2008, it was announced on NME.COM that Courtney Love made an official announcement saying Ryan Gosling would portray her former husband, Kurt Cobain, in his upcoming bio film. In January 2008 it was announced that Gosling would be appearing in a reboot of the Jack Ryan franchise, By Any Means Necessary

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Personal life

Gosling divides his time between Toronto and Los Angeles, California. Gosling also has several homemade tattoos. He has a dog named "George" whom he rescued from a kennel in Los Angeles. He is a partner in Beverly Hills restaurant, "Tagine", which specializes in Moroccan cuisine.

He was in a relationship with his The Notebook co-star, fellow Canadian Rachel McAdams, but Gosling announced their breakup in the November 2007 issue of GQ. He calls Rachel one of the "greatest loves of his life." The Notebook director Nick Cassavetes had previously said that he was surprised to see the two together, as they argued a lot on the set of The Notebook.

Gosling notes Gary Oldman as his all-time favorite actor.

Filmography

Ryan Gosling Interview

LOS ANGELES, April 5 — When the actor Ryan Gosling was about 8, he says, he came home from school beaten and bloody. It was not the first time that had happened, and his mother ordered him back to school to bloody his tormentors.

So he did. Mr. Gosling, 23, recalled the incident: "I walked into school. Everything got really quiet. I found one of the kids in front of a urinal. I smacked his face into the tile, and he bled. The other kid was at his desk. I picked up a math textbook and made his nose bleed."

Then he went home and told his mother what he had done. "I was crying," he said. "I didn’t want to do it. I don’t like violence. And she was so sad." He took a breath."I never went back to that school again."

That little boy grew up to be the sensitive young actor who has grabbed Hollywood’s attention with performances in projects like "The Believer" (2001), an award-winning film in which he played the leading role, that of a Jew who becomes a charismatic neo-Nazi leader.

Now Mr. Gosling is starring in "The United States of Leland" as Leland Fitzgerald, an emotionally detached young man who has inexplicably murdered a mentally disturbed adolescent. At the centerpiece of a talented cast including Don Cheadle, Kevin Spacey and Lena Olin, Mr. Gosling manages to hold the viewer’s attention with a kind of innocent intensity and a youthful pathos.

They are not qualities that he lacks in real life. Mr. Gosling is tall and handsome, though not conventionally so, with a slim, angular face and a slight frame slipped inside a pin-striped blazer. He has blond hair, a fuzzlike beard and faded blue eyes.

In a movie industry constantly on the prowl for young leading men, he looks very much like one possible answer to Hollywood’s continual casting quandaries. Mr. Gosling has a principal role in the forthcoming period romantic drama "The Notebook," as a young man obsessed by love. And at the annual ShoWest convention in March, he was named the Male Star of Tomorrow by movie exhibitors, a sign that theater owners think that his is a face that can sell tickets.

Nick Cassavetes, director of "The Notebook," said he had no doubt that Mr. Gosling would become a major actor, and a major star. "He doesn’t make a move that he doesn’t feel," Mr. Cassavetes said in a phone interview. "I just think: he’s 23, he might as well be 63 years old. He’s like one of those freaks, he kind of gets it. He’s honest, that’s really what you want out of an actor."

Not that Mr. Gosling quite knows where he wants to be in the Hollywood pantheon. Even the ShoWest recognition threw him a little. "I was confused as to why I was there," he said, noting that mainstream theater owners did not show either "The Believer" or another cutting-edge film, "The Slaughter Rule" (2002), a football movie about male bonding. "I kind of felt it was an opportunity to say I appreciate their acknowledgment of those choices," he said.

But acting was not a likely career path. Mr. Gosling was born in London, Ontario, and reared in a small paper mill town called Cornwall, where he knew he did not fit in. "I was very lost when I was young," he says, allowing himself a quick swig of a Heineken. "I was finding my way."

His parents divorced, and Mr. Gosling had continual trouble in school. "I didn’t play sports," he said. "I couldn’t read or write. I was a brat, always in trouble." He was frequently beaten up. The school put him in a special education class, where he studied with mentally handicapped children. "My teachers thought I was stupid," he said. "So did I."

After the fight that led to his leaving school, Mr. Gosling’s mother quit work to school him at home, helping him learn to read and write. She found creative ways to have him express his knowledge. "I gained self-confidence," he said. "In that time I felt, like, not so worthless."

But when he headed to high school, he felt again out of place, and dropped out. Fed up at 17, he got in his car and drove to Los Angeles — "somewhere where there might be a place for me," as he put it.

Though Mr. Gosling had no formal acting training, a Canadian agent took him on, and he won a brief role in a New Zealand television series (quickly canceled), then landed a spot as an extra in the Denzel Washington film "Remember the Titans," as a member of the football team.

But his first real acting job came in 2001 with "The Believer," an astonishing debut in which he played Danny Balint, a charismatic skinhead leader who happened to be Jewish. The movie, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, was so discomfiting to distributors (it is based on a true story) that despite the critical acclaim, the film barely made it into theaters.

But it was the role that convinced Mr. Gosling that acting could somehow provide an outlet for his own roiling emotions. "After I did `The Believer,’ things changed for me," he said. "I felt I had a place I could put the things I had inside of me into." It convinced him that movies could be "something you could care about, be passionate about," he said.

He continued: "I was moved by it. It was like truth — it wasn’t entertainment. I connected with how much Danny felt. His feelings consumed him. That’s a theme in all my characters. They feel too much. They become fanatical. Leland feels so much that he can’t feel at all."

Those characters seem connected, however unconsciously, to the lonely boy Ryan Gosling once was. Even his description of his roles sounds as if he might easily be describing himself. "I felt like Danny was not meant for this world," he observed. "Leland is definitely too sensitive for this life. If you’re small and weak and sensitive, there’s not much of a place for you here."

Mr. Gosling went on to talk about the Hollywood machine, how it makes him wary. He spoke about how his emotions sometimes betray him, and how movies can lie. "I don’t feel people are portrayed accurately on film," he said. "People are more complicated. Life is more complicated. I’ve never seen any love like movie love."

A couple of weeks ago, Ms. Gosling’s mother called him from Canada. "She said, `I have visions of you, and you’re trying to stay afloat in this capitalist ocean,’ " Mr. Gosling said. "She’s afraid I’m being packaged." He paused. "My mother was always a very wise woman."

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