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Mark Wahlberg Biography
Actor, former rapper. Born June 5, 1971, in Dorchester, Massachusetts. Wahlberg grew up the youngest of nine children in a working class Irish Catholic family in the Boston district of Dorchester. Mark Wahlberg's parents divorced when he was 11; his mother has since blamed her own emotional neglect for her youngest son's descent into juvenile delinquency during the next several years. At 14, Wahlberg dropped out of school and began making his living on the streets -- hustling, stealing, and selling drugs. Two years later, he hit rock bottom when he was jailed for his role in the savage beating of a Vietnamese man. Although the crime was believed by many to be racially motivated, Wahlberg has continually denied that race played a part in the attack. His 45-day stint in prison was a self-proclaimed turning point in the 16-year-old Wahlberg's life. Vowing to give himself some direction in his life, he also began body building seriously, chiseling his body into impressive form.

By the time Wahlberg emerged from prison, his older brother Donnie had rocketed to stardom as one of five fresh-faced members of the pop band New Kids on the Block. Donnie decided to help his younger brother find his own niche in the music business. What Wahlberg lacked in singing ability, he made up for in charisma and good looks -- with Donnie's hip-hop arrangements and producing help, Marky Mark (his rap name) and his back-up deejay and dancers (dubbed "the Funky Bunch") recorded a debut album, Music for the People (1991). Driven by the success of the hit dance singles "Good Vibrations" and "Wildside" (and by Marky Mark's readiness to discard his shirt and drop his pants onstage and in his videos), the album went platinum, selling over a million copies.

One of pop music's hottest new commodities, Wahlberg (and his rock-hard physique) became even more ubiquitous when he signed a two-year contract with the designer Calvin Klein to model underwear. His raucous public persona, he once became involved in a much-talked-about brawl with Madonna and her entourage at a Los Angeles nightclubonly served to increase his popular appeal, until news began surfacing about his criminal past and his possibly racist and homophobic tendencies.

In 1993, this part of Wahlberg's personal life was seriously questioned when he was accused of condoning blatantly homophobic remarks made on a British talk show by his fellow guest, the reggae singer Shabba Ranks. Combined with the disappointing sales of the Funky Bunch's second album, You Gotta Believe (1992), the public criticism of Wahlberg's career seemed to be steering his career towards certain death. The 22-year-old's survival instincts kicked in, however, and he soon made a move into another realm of the entertainment world -- acting.

After appearing in a 1993 television movie, The Substitute, Wahlberg made his big screen debut in Penny Marshall's lightweight Renaissance Man (1994), in which he played one of a group of Army recruits taught by an ex-advertising salesman (Danny DeVito). His innate brand of screen presence led to his casting in his breakthrough role, that of the drug-addled best friend of Leonardo DiCaprio's character in The Basketball Diaries (1995), a small-scale but acclaimed film based on poet-musician Jim Carroll's dark autobiography of his own adolescent struggles with heroin addiction. After two more attention-getting performances in Fear (1996) and Traveller (1997), Wahlberg cemented his artistic and commercial reputation (and left "Marky Mark" far behind) with a starring role as dishwasher turned porn star Eddie Adams (aka Dirk Diggler) in writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson's buzzworthy Boogie Nights (1997), costarring Burt Reynolds. Though his next two films -- The Big Hit (1998) and The Corruptor (1999), costarring Chinese action superstar Chow Yun-Fat -- were less than successful, Wahlberg returned with a bang in the acclaimed Three Kings (1999). The film costarred Wahlberg, George Clooney, Ice Cube, and Spike Jonze as renegade U.S. servicemen in the Persian Gulf during the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War conflict.

Mark Wahlberg