Today is Ron Perlman’s birthday. He is 64 but is still cracking heads and smoking cigars and making mediocre movies very watchable. A classically trained actor, has appeared in countless stage plays, feature films and television productions. He was born in Washington Heights, Manhattan, New York. With a career spanning over three decades, Perlman has worked alongside such diverse actors as Marlon Brando, Sean Connery, Dominique Pinon, Brad Dourif, Ed Harris, John Hurt, Jude Law, Christina Ricci, Federico Luppi, Sigourney Weaver, Michael Wincott, and Elijah Wood to name a few.
While he has never been a star, Perlman has always had a large fan-base. He started out strong as Amoukar, one of the tribesmen in Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Academy Award-winning film Quest for Fire (1981).
Perlman teamed up with Annaud again, this time as a hunchback named Salvatore in The Name of the Rose (1986).
His first real breakthrough came later when he landed the role of Vincent, the lion-man, opposite Linda Hamilton in the cult-series Beauty and the Beast (1987). His work in this role earned him not only a Golden Globe Award but a underground fan following. Sadly the series got cancelled in its third season shortly after Hamilton’s character’s death.
After that he spent time doing supporting work on television and independent films such as Guillermo del Toro’s debut Cronos (1993)
(where a lifelong friendship and collaboration between the director and Perlman would blossom) as Angel and his first lead role as One in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s surreal The City of Lost Children (1995).
His first real big role in a mainstream film came when Jeunet wanted him for the brutish Johner in his first Hollywood outing Alien: Resurrection (1997).
Perlman has also used his distinctive voice to his advantage, appearing in many animated films/series, commercials and he is a video game fan favorite because of his work on such games as the Fallout: A Post-Nuclear Role-Playing Game (1997) series.
It was not until much later he got worldwide fame when his good friend Guillermo del Toro helped him land the title role in the big-budget comic book movie Hellboy (2004).
Del Toro fought the studio for 4 years because they wanted a more secure name, but he stood his ground and in 2004, after almost 25 years in and out of obscurity, Perlman became and household name and a sought out actor. Perlman has had one of the most off-beat careers in film, playing everything from a prehistoric ape-man to an aging transsexual and will always be a rarity in Hollywood.
Other notable roles include the cunning Norman Arbuthnot in The Last Supper (1995)
sniper expert Koulikov in Enemy at the Gates (2001), vampire leader Reinhardt in Blade II (2002), his reprisal of Hellboy in Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008) and biker chief Clarence Morrow in the popular series Sons of Anarchy (2008).
He lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife, Opal, and their two children, Blake and Brandon.
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