Michael Ironside
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| Michael Ironside | |
 Michael Ironside as Cmdr Dick 'Jester' Weatherly in Top Gun |
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| Birth name | Frederick Reginald Ironside |
| Born | February 12, 1950 (age 57) Toronto, Ontario |
Michael Ironside (born Frederick Reginald Ironside[1] on February 12, 1950) 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. Ironside is a method actor who keeps in character between takes.
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[edit] Biography
[edit] Early life
Ironside was born in Toronto, Ontario to Patricia June Passmore, a homemaker, and Robert Walter Ironside, who worked in maintenance as a street lighting technician and laborer.[1][2] He attended the Ontario College of Art in Toronto and wrote a play at the age of fifteen, "The Shelter", winning the first prize in a university contest.[3]
[edit] Career
One of Ironside's early roles was in Scanners, an early film by David Cronenberg. His breakthrough role was in the television miniseries V: The Final Battle as Ham Tyler. He is also known for his roles in Top Gun and Total Recall. After a brief stint in ER's inaugural season, he was 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 become a 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, and is cast as the Global Defense Initiative's Lieutenant General Jack Granger in the upcoming Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars. Ironside has recently signed a 5 year deal to portray Captain Jonas Trager in the Spaceworks Television scifi series, Ice Planet.
Ironside was successful as an arm wrestler in his teenage years. It is not known if he still practises the sport. Curiously enough, he has "lost" his left arm in at least two of his films (Starship Troopers and The Machinist) and both arms in a fight with Arnold Schwarzenegger's character in the film Total Recall.
[edit] Partial filmography
[edit] Actor
- Scanners (1981)
- Visiting Hours (1982)
- Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone (1983)
- V (The Series) (1983)
- Murder in Space (TV Series) (1985)
- Top Gun (1986)
- Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (1987)
- Total Recall (1990)
- Highlander II: The Quickening (1991)
- Guncrazy (1992)
- Free Willy (1993)
- The Next Karate Kid (1994)
- Major Payne (1995)
- seaQuest 2032 (1995)
- The Arrow (1997)
- Starship Troopers (1997)
- Chicago Cab, aka Hellcab (1998)
- The Arrangement (1999)
- The Omega Code (1999)
- The Perfect Storm (2000)
- Borderline Normal (2000)
- Heavy Metal 2000 (2000) (voice)
- Walker, Texas Ranger (2000) (As the Chairman)
- Jett Jackson: The Movie (2001)
- The Last Chapter (2002)
- The Machinist (2004)
- Smallville (TV series) (2004)
- Andromeda (TV series) (2004)
- Young Blades (2005)
- Desperate Housewives (2005)
- Deepwater (2006)
- Stargate SG-1 (2006)
- Masters of Horror episode The V Word
- Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars (2007) ...as Lieutenant General Jack Granger
[edit] Voice acting
- in animated series
- Superman: The Animated Series ...as Darkseid
- The New Batman Adventures ...as '80's Batman
- Justice League/Unlimited ...as Darkseid
- Heavy Metal 2000 ...as Tyler
- in video games
- RLH (2002) ...as Cmdr. Mason
- Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell (2002) ...as Sam Fisher
- Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow (2004) ...as Sam Fisher
- Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory (2005) ...as Sam Fisher
- Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Essentials (2006) ... as Sam Fisher
- Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Double Agent (2006) ...as Sam Fisher
- TimeShift (2006) ...as Doctor Krone
- Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars (2007) ...as General Jack Granger
[edit] Director
- The Arrangement (1999)
Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars (2007)
[edit] Screenwriter
- The Arrangement (1999)
- Chaindance (1990)
