Ryan Gosling：The Biography

Acclaimed for his good looks as much as his searing acting ability, Canadian actor Ryan Gosling first came to attention, aged 12 , after beating 15,000 hopefuls to become a Mouseketeer in Disney's Mickey Mouse Club alongside Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and Justine Timberlake. After the show ended, Ryan spent his teenage years acting in nearly 200 episodes on television, before landing the lead role in the TV show Young Hercules. Wanting to move into film, he made his feature debut in Remember the Titans, a successful Denzel Washington vehicle. He then found acclaim playing a 'Jewish Nazi' in the controversial, independent film The Believer, which opened the door to a major role alongside Sandra Bullock in the thriller Murder By Numbers. Everything clicked with the 2004 box office hit The Notebook; it was a film so romantic that Ryan and his co-star, Rachel McAdams, ended up falling in love off-screen as well. The film turned Ryan into a Hollywood pin-up, and in the wake of its success he famously spent six months working in a Los Angeles sandwich shop, to regain a sense of perspective. Since then, he has played one challenging role after another, including a suicidal young man (Stay), a drug addict school teacher (Half Nelson), an alienated man whose only meaningful relationship is with a blow up doll (Lars and the Real Girl), while inching towards mainstream success with acclaimed performances in films like Blue Valentine, Drive, Crazy Stupid Love and Gangster Squad. Aged 32, his is now poised to become a major movie star. Enigmatic and humble, with a legendary compulsion to lose himself in every role he takes on, this is the story of an actor who is incredibly close to his mother, plays in a band, co-owns a Moroccan restaurant in Beverly Hills, laughs off those who tag him a sex symbol and who shoulder shrugs at the widespread conviction that he's this generation's Marlon Brando.