Laurence Fishburne
Born: July 30 1961
Where: Augusta, Georgia
Although a worthy Oscar winner for his portrayal of Ike Turner in What's Love Got To Do With It, Fishburne is probably best known as Morpheus in the Matrix series.
Raised in Brooklyn by his divorced mother, Fishburne began his professional career with a New York stage debut at age ten.
He was only 15 when he won the role of a young soldier in Francis Ford Coppola's Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now and went on to work with Coppola on Rumble Fish, Gardens Of Stone and The Cotton Club.
Laurence has collaborated twice with noted director John Singleton, on Boyz N The Hood, for which he won an NAACP Image Award for Best Actor, and Higher Learning.
Other credits include Othello, Deep Cover and Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple, but his biggest commercial success came in 1999 with the sci-fi action blockbuster The Matrix.
Finding a balance between action hero and Zen Master, Laurence offered a commanding presence as the mysterious time-travelling Morpheus, a role he would reprise for The Matrix Reloaded and its filmed-back-to-back sequel, The Matrix Revolutions.
After the mega-success of The Matrix, he took his first turn behind the camera as the director of Once in the Life, an adaptation of his 1994 play Riff Raff. He also played Sgt Whitey Powers in Clint Eastwood's Oscar-winning Mystic River.
In 2004, he played a mobster in the remake of John Carpenter's 1976 cult classic Assault on Precinct 13.
