Ryan Gosling, born 1980, is 33 today. A former Mouseketeer, the infamous star of The Notebook, the infamous star of the “Hey Girl” meme, co-owner of a Moroccan restaurant in L.A., member of the band Dead Man’s Bones, the man everyone is in love with… it’s so hard to say much about Gosling that hasn’t already been said and dissected by his legion of fans.
Aside from his work on the Goosebumps TV series and a role as one of the players in Remember the Titans, Gosling’s first big break was in The Believer, as a former Jewish teen who falls in with a neo-Nazi crowd and subscribes to their beliefs wholeheartedly out of a sense of self-hatred for what he perceives as the “weakness” of the members of his own faith. The movie plays as a sort of parallel to American History X, and asks some of the same questions (is hate innate or taught?), while also presenting a character who comes to Naziism from a different angle.
In 2006, Gosling starred in Half Nelson alongside Shareeka Epps and Anthony Mackie. He plays an inner-city teacher who has a natural rapport with his students and coaches the girl’s basketball time, while also nursing a severe addiction to cocaine. One of his students, Drey (Epps) catches him, and a tenuous friendship forms out of his desire to not get caught, while she also deals with a friend of her brother’s (Mackie) who wants to lure her into the world of drug dealing. The film earned Gosling his first nomination for Best Actor at the Academy Awards.
Among Gosling’s well-known and rightly popular roles, besides The Notebook, were his breakthrough as one of the Leopold-and-Loen-ian murderers in Murder By Numbers, the guy who helped Steve Carell become more of a ladies’ man in Crazy, Stupid, Love, the nearly wordless and nameless protagonist of Drive, the other half of a couple falling apart in Blue Valentine, and a gangster fighter (once again flirting with Emma Stone) in Gangster Squad. Next year will see his directorial debut, How To Catch A Monster, and his participation in a Terrence Malick project.
Other birthdays today:
Anne Hathaway (31)
Ashley Williams (35)
Radha Mitchell (40)
Sam Lloyd (50)
Wallace Shawn (70)
