Keanu Reeves

Keanu Reeves is a Canadian actor, born on September 2, 1964 in Beirut, Lebanon. He is the son of Patricia Bond (née Taylor), a costume designer/performer, and Samuel Nowlin Reeves, Jr., a geologist. Reeves’ mother is English while his father is a Hawaiian-born American of English, Irish, Portuguese, Hawaiian and Chinese descent. After parents’ marriage dissolved, Keanu moved with his mother and younger sister Kim to New York City, then Toronto. Since then, he never reconnected with his biological father, who served time in prison. He was paroled after serving two years of a ten-year sentence for selling heroin at Hilo Airport in 1992.
Reeves named after his uncle Henry Keanu Reeves. "Keanu" is a derivation of Reeves' great-great-uncle Keaweaheulu, whose name means "the soft breeze raising" in Hawaiian. In high school, Reeves was lukewarm toward academics but took a keen interest in ice hockey (as team goalie, he earned the nickname "The Wall" by high school hockey team De La Salle College "Oaklands”) and drama. He eventually dropped out of school to pursue an acting career.
Reeves began his acting career at the age of nine, appearing in various theatre productions and commercials. After a few stage gigs and a handful of made-for-TV movies, he scored a supporting role in the Rob Lowe hockey flick Youngblood (1986), which was filmed in Canada. Shortly after the production wrapped, Reeves packed his bags and headed for Hollywood. Reeves then got the lead role in the dark adolescent drama River's Edge (1986), but his first popular success was the role of totally rad dude Ted Logan in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989). The wacky time-travel movie became something of a cultural phenomenon, and audiences would forever confuse Reeves's real-life persona with that of his doofy on-screen counterpart. Not long enough Reeves played a slumming rich boy opposite River Phoenix's narcoleptic male hustler in My Own Private Idaho (1991), an unlucky lawyer who stumbles into the vampire's lair in Dracula (1992), and Shakespearean party-pooper Don Jon in Much Ado About Nothing (1993).
Reeves became a big-budget action star with the release of Speed I in 1994. Its success heralded an era of five years in which Reeves would alternate between largely unwatched small films, like Feeling Minnesota (1996) and The Last Time I Committed Suicide (1997), and unwatched big films like Johnny Mnemonic (1995) and Chain Reaction (1996). After all this Reeves did the unthinkable and passed on the Speed sequel, but he struck box-office gold again a few years later with the Wachowski brothers' cyberadventure The Matrix (1999) playing the role of Neo.
Despite this fame and career successes, from 'stoner'-type roles in "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure," to serious dramatic roles in "Sweet November," "The Devil's Advocate," and "The Matrix" trilogy, as far as Reeves is concerned, he's just a regular guy who rides a motorcycle, plays in a band (Dogstar), and shows up every now and then for a movie shoot.