CELEBS FACTORY

Andy Serkis has had leading roles in mega-blockbusters that have earned over $2.5 billion worldwide. He's the main character in a major movie that opened this weekend, and this winter he'll appear in a new 3D adventure film directed by Steven Spielberg. And yet, odds are good that if you bumped into him on the street you'd have no idea he was a movie star. Because usually you never see his face.

Serkis is one of the preeminent actors in the field of "performance capture." That's the process where an actor's movements are recorded in three dimensions and used to create the animation of a fully digital character.

Serkis broke new ground when he portrayed the computer-generated Gollum in the "Lord of the Rings" films, and he has taken the form to another level in the new film 'Rise of the Planet of the Apes'.

A native of London, Andy Serkis started his acting career on the stage. He appeared on British television throughout the 1990s, and scored the occasional film role like in Mike Leigh's Oscar-winning 'Topsy-Turvy'. But his career took off in a new and unexpected direction when Peter Jackson cast him in his 'Lord of the Rings' trilogy.

Since his success in Peter Jackson's 'The Lord of The Rings' and 'King Kong', Serkis has been seen in several live-action films like the one in Christopher Nolan's 'The Prestige' that had him as Tesla's assistant and another movie 'Longford" for which he was nominated for a Golden Globe Award.

This weekend Serkis is back as the lead and entirely computer generated character: Caesar the chimpanzee in "Rise of the Planet of the Apes." Unlike the earlier "Planet of the Apes" movies, all the simians in this were created in the computer using WETA Digital -- the same effects company that created Gollum, King Kong, and the aliens of 'Avatar'.

Serkis isn't done with performance capture. In December, he'll play Captain Haddock in Steven Spielberg's all-CGI film "The Adventures of Tintin," based on the internationally popular comic books. And his career will come around full circle as he reprises the role of Gollum in Peter Jackson's two-movie adaptation of "The Hobbit," coming in 2012 and '13.