Dan Aykroyd - Biography

Arguably the most formidable talent to emerge from The Not Ready for Prime-Time Players, the celebrated original ensemble of NBC's "Saturday Night Live", Dan Aykroyd has enjoyed considerable success in other arenas since leaving that incomparable showcase after a four-year run (1974-79). A surprisingly anonymous and protean writer-performer amid a cast that boasted several strong personalities, he specialized in sketch comedy that allowed him to disappear into characters. Aykroyd displayed a flair for inspired mimicry with indelible impressions of Presidents Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon, as well as chef Julia Child. His comic creations included the paternal alien Beldar Conehead, E. Buzz Miller, a sleazy pitchman of bizarre products (i.e., Bass-O-Matic), and half of two very different "brother acts": the "wild and crazy" Czechoslovakian brothers (with Steve Martin) and the ultra-cool Blues Brothers (with John Belushi).

The Canadian-born Aykroyd produced, co-wrote and acted in a series of 15-minute comedies, "A Change for a Quarter" (1972), for a private cable company and joined the famed Second City Comedy Troupe the same year, performing with them in Chicago and Toronto until 1974. He amassed Canadian film and TV credits producing, writing, and acting before hooking up with "SNL" writer-producer Lorne Michaels. After the "SNL" gold rush, he began a successful movie career, making his US film debut in Steven Spielberg's period slapstick epic "1941" (1979). Aykroyd next co-starred with close friend and collaborator Belushi in the comparably gargantuan rock'n'roll comedy "The Blues Brothers" (1980), which he also wrote in tandem with director John Landis. The concept was simple--two white guys who admired and emulated black bluesmen--but it provided plenty of mileage. What began as an "SNL" sketch grew into several albums, a ten-city tour, an animated series and two feature films.

Aykroyd went on to become a familiar face in 80s film comedy. He sometimes headlined ("Doctor Detroit" 1982; "My Stepmother Is an Alien" 1988) but more often shared the lead with comparable celebrities in a wildly variable series of films: Belushi in "Neighbors" (1981); Eddie Murphy in John Landis' "Trading Places" (1983); Chevy Chase in Landis' "Spies Like Us" (1985); and Tom Hanks in "Dragnet" (1987). Lacking a distinct comic persona, Aykroyd has been most effective in character bits or playing highly stylized characters. A prime example of the former is his splendid comic duet with Albert Brooks in the Landis-directed shaggy dog prologue to "Twilight Zone - The Movie" (1983) while his hilariously uptight Joe Friday in "Dragnet" may be his most sustained performance. As a screenwriter and performer, Aykroyd scored big with the first multimillion-dollar scare comedy "Ghostbusters" (1984) and its popular 1989 sequel. He co-wrote both with co-star Harold Ramis and shrewdly gave all the best lines to cynical front man Bill Murray.

The late 80s marked a change in direction in Aykroyd's film career. Now amiably beefy and middle-aged, the once lean performer effectively transformed his screen image and earned a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination with his first (mostly) dramatic role as the dutiful son in "Driving Miss Daisy" (1989). Aykroyd became a respected character actor in various genres in 90s Hollywood movies. He was relatively restrained as the widowed father of a young girl in the comedy-drama "My Girl" (1991) and its 1994 sequel "My Girl 2". In 1992 alone, Aykroyd provided sturdy support to ascendant comic Julie Kavner as her eccentric manager in Nora Ephron's "This Is My Life", meshed well with Robert Redford and a talented ensemble in the caper comedy "Sneakers" and even proved an acceptable Mack Sennett in Richard Attenborough's ambitious but flawed biopic "Chaplin". He also slipped in a rare guest appearance on television in "Yellow" (1991), an episode of HBO's "Tales from the Crypt" directed by Robert Zemeckis.

Aykroyd's critically despised debut as a writer-director, "Nothing But Trouble" (1991), generated nothing but apathy at the box office. He fared better scripting and starring in the feature length version of "Coneheads" (1993), a somewhat appealing, silly family film that offered amusing cameos by a gaggle of "SNL" cast members from different eras. In 1995 and 1996, Aykroyd's list of movies not to see (i.e., "Tommy Boy" and "Canadian Bacon" both 1995, "Celtic Pride" and "Getting Away with Murder" both 1996, among others) made his few tolerable films ("Sgt. Bilko" and "My Fellow Americans" both 1996) seem that much better by comparison. Aykroyd got back on track as a truculent assassin in George Armitage's sleek, snappy, stylized "Grosse Pointe Blank" (1997), forever pestering John Cusack to join his fledgling hit man's union, then dusted off his blues outfit for "Blues Brothers 2000" (1998), with John Goodman standing in for the late John Belushi. Once again co-scripted by Aykroyd and Landis, "Blues Brothers 2000" featured return performances by James Brown and Aretha Franklin and brought back Kathleen Freeman (Sister Mary Stigmata) and Frank Oz (corrections officer) to reprise their original roles.

With his wild days behind him, Aykroyd, following in the footsteps of former "SNL" co-star Jane Curtin (who found renewed small screen success on NBC's "3rd Rock From the Sun"), opted for the grind of a weekly TV series. The Not-Ready-for-Prime-Time Player's primetime sitcom "Soul Man" premiered on ABC in the spring of 1997, sandwiched between two episodes of Tim Allen's "Home Improvement". The show cast Aykroyd as a widowed, motorcycle-riding Protestant minister raising four children in the same neighborhood where Allen's Tim Taylor character lives, and Allen appeared in the first four episodes. Nevertheless, the sitcom failed to find an audience and was gone from the network's schedule by the fall of 1998. In addition, Aykroyd served as a creative consultant for the animated "The Blues Brothers" (1998), a mid-season replacement on the UPN Network, and wrote a third "Ghostbusters" film with Harold Ramis in which the torch will be passed to a new generation of ghost-chasers, though a production deal has yet to materialize.

Aykroyd continued to be a regular presence on the big screen, co-starring in "Diamonds' (1999) with Kirk Douglas and Corbin Allred as three generations of men who embark on a trip to a brothel in search of a missing stash of gems. Focusing on supporting roles in a variety of genres, he also played Jason Biggs' father in the mild teen romantic comedy "Loser" (2000), one of Gillian Anderson's wealthy suitors in the film adaptation of Edith Wharton's period drama "House of Mirth" (2000), as a military officer in "Pearl Harbor" (2001), a cost-cutting insurance office boss in Woody Allen's "The Curse of the Jade Scorpion" (2001), the Arizona governor in Reitman's dismal UFO comedy "Evolution" (2001), and as Britney Spears' father in her film debut "Crossroads" (2002). After several memorable cameos over the years (especially as Sen. Bob Dole), Aykroyd at last formally served as host of "Saturday Night Live" in May of 2003, and began a recurring role as Danny Michalski on his longtime pal Jim Belushi's hit sit-com "According to Jim" (ABC, 2002- ). The actor continued to play his trade in several lower-profile efforts before playing a kind-hearted doctor tending to Drew Barrymore, the victim of recurrent short-term memory loss, in the romantic comedy "50 First Dates" (2004).