Bryan Brown

Born: 23 June, 1947
Where: Sydney, Australia

Bryan begun a career in insurance before he started to appear in local amateur productions and got hit with the acting bug.

He made his feature debut in 1977 in a bit role in The Love Letters From Teralba Road, and went on to appear in eight more films over the next two years.

His rugged good looks generally caused him to be cast as small-time crooks. Director John Duigan offered Brown two of his best roles of this period: a bookstore owner drawn to a prostitute in The Winter of Our Discontent and a nightclub owner who rekindles a long ago affair in Far East.

His first US-made feature was F/X, a thriller in which he was a movie special effects genius who becomes embroiled in an assassination plot. (For the inevitable sequel, FX2 - The Deadly Art of Illusion, Bryan added executive producer to his credit.

Bryan is perhaps best-remembered as the bartender-mentor to Tom Cruise in Cocktail and as Sigourney Weaver's married lover in the biopic of Dian Fossey Gorillas in the Mist.

Although his feature output slowed somewhat in the 90s, Bryan continued to work in TV-movies.