Actor. Born September 2, 1964, in Beirut, Lebanon. Reeves’ British mother, Patricia, reportedly met his father, Samuel Reeves, a geologist of Hawaiian-Chinese descent (the name Keanu means “cool breeze over the mountains” in Hawaiian), while working in a Beirut nightclub as a performer. After their brief marriage ended, Patricia moved with Keanu and his younger sister, Kim, to New York City, where she married Paul Aaron, a stage and film producer and director. The family relocated to Toronto, Canada, around 1970. A somewhat lackadaisical student, the adolescent Reeves turned instead to his twin passions, drama and ice hockey. At age 14, he began seriously pursuing a career in acting, appearing in bit parts in Canadian television series and commercials. He switched high schools four times, and dropped out for good in 1984. That same year, Reeves made his professional stage debut in a Toronto production of Wolfboy, a homoerotic drama that generated a good deal of buzz among local audiences and critics. Leaving local theater behind, Reeves made the long trip from Toronto to Los Angeles in order to make his bid for Hollywood success.

After eight months in L.A., Reeves landed his first starring role, in the disturbing drama River’s Edge (1987), costarring Crispin Glover, Ione Skye, and Dennis Hopper. He earned critical praise for his understated performance as a teenager whose friend commits murder. The next year, Reeves appeared alongside John Malkovich, Glenn Close, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Uma Thurman in Dangerous Liaisons (1988), a well reviewed film adaptation of the controversial French play. Almost simultaneously, he was shooting to stardom with his moronic but oddly winning turn as half of the dim-witted duo at the center of a very different film, the comedy Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989). Though the critics almost universally panned Reeves and the film, both proved to be extremely popular with audiences—a pattern that would replicate itself again and again as his career continued.

Reeves worked almost nonstop throughout the next few years, appearing in such diverse projects as the surfer action-drama Point Break (1991), costarring Patrick Swayze; Kenneth Branagh’s star-studded film version of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing (1993), with Branagh, Denzel Washington, and Emma Thompson; and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), directed by Francis Ford Coppola and costarring Gary Oldman and Winona Ryder.