Clancy Brown
Born: January 5 1959
Where: Urbana, Ohio, USA
The actor chilled audiences as the vicious warder Captain Byron Hadley who terrorises Tim Robbins in prison drama The Shawshank Redemption.
As an actor, he's tended to specialise in thuggish roles including nasty jailbird Viking in Bad Boys and Viktor the Monster in The Bride.
Brown also enjoys a parallel career as a voice artist with work including Eugene H Krabs in SpongeBob SquarePants and Mr Freeze in the Batman cartoon series.
The song of a congressman, Brown was born into a rich Ohio publishing family and graduated from the prestigious St. Albans Prep School in Washington DC.
He earned scholarship to Northwestern University where he studied theatre before making his stage debut in Chicago.
If he hadn't landed a job in the theatre, Brown claimed he would have been (in order) a fireman, an aristocrat, an archaeologist/anthropologist, a scuba diver and a circus acrobat.
He made his big screen debut in 1983 in Bad Boys with Sean Penn and went on to play Viktor in The Bride two years later.
Thunder Alley followed and in 1986 he starred in the Christopher Lambert action adventure Highlander.
Roles followed in actioners Extreme Prejudice and Katherine Bigelow's Blue Steel alongside Jamie Lee Curtis and Pet Sematary II.
In 1994, he attracted attention in The Shawshank Redemption and followed it up with a small role in Robbins' Dead Man Walking and the erotic drama Female Perversions.
Voice work followed in the cartoons Superman: The Last Son of Krypton, Mighty Ducks and Crash Bandicoot.
In 1997, he played career sergeant Zim in the sci-fi horror spoof Starship Troopers and went on to star alongside Robin Williams in the family comedy Flubber.
Voice work took up the bulk of Brown's time until he was cast as the sympathetic Lt Jimmy Williams in boxing drama The Hurricane in 1999.
Other big screen roles included the crime drama The Laramie Project and Steven Spielberg's Minority Report with Tom Cruise.
Recent work has included the voice of Krabs in the big screen version of SpongeBob SquarePants in 2005.
