Michael Ironside (born Frederick Reginald Ironside on February 12, 1950) is a Canadian character actor. He has also worked as a producer, film director, and screenwriter in movie and television series in various Canadian and American works. He is best known for playing villains or "tough guy" heroes, though he has also portrayed sympathetic characters. Ironside is a method actor who keeps in character between takes.
Ironside was born in Toronto, Ontario to Patricia June Passmore, a homemaker, and Robert Walter Ironside, who worked in maintenance as a street lighting technician and laborer. He attended the Ontario College of Art in Toronto and wrote a play at the age of fifteen, "The Shelter", winning the first prize in a university contest. He also won the Senior writing award for Riverdale Collegiate Institute in 1967.
One of Ironside's first roles was in Scanners, an early film by David Cronenberg. His breakthrough role was in the television miniseries V: The Final Battle as Ham Tyler. He is also known for his roles in Top Gun and Total Recall. After a brief stint in ER's inaugural season, he was tapped to replace Roy Scheider as captain of the high-tech submarine seaQuest in the third season of seaQuest DSV as Captain Oliver Hudson. However, NBC cancelled the series after only thirteen episodes with Ironside as the star.
Ironside has also been recognized for his voice acting. He played the voice of iconic comic book villain Darkseid in Superman: The Animated Series and its spinoff, Justice League to great accolade. In one episode of The New Batman Adventures, he voiced Batman in a Dark Knight sequence.
He has also worked in video games as the voice of Tom Clancy's character Sam Fisher in the Splinter Cell games along with the PSP game Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Essentials, and is cast as the Global Defense Initiative's Lieutenant General Jack Granger in Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars. Ironside recently signed a 5 year deal to portray Captain Jonas Trager in the Spaceworks Television scifi series, Ice Planet.
Ironside was successful as an arm wrestler in his teenage years. It is not known if he still practises the sport. Curiously enough, he has "lost" his left arm in at least two of his films (Starship Troopers and The Machinist) and both arms in a fight with Arnold Schwarzenegger's character in the film Total Recall.
