Short answers, pulled from the story.
Andy Serkis is best known for his motion capture performances, most notably as Gollum in The Lord of the Rings film trilogy (2001-2003) and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012), as Caesar in the Planet of the Apes reboot series (2011-2017), and as King Kong in the 2005 film. He has received an Empire Award and two Saturn Awards for his motion capture work.
Andy Serkis was born Andrew Clement Serkis on the 20th of April 1964 in Ruislip Manor, Middlesex. His father, Clement Serkis, was an Iraqi-Armenian gynaecologist whose family originally bore the surname Serkisian, and his mother, Lylie Weech, was half Iraqi and half English. He grew up between Britain and cities including Baghdad, Tyre, Sidon, and Damascus.
Andy Serkis has won an Empire Award and two Saturn Awards for his motion capture acting. He received BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations for playing serial killer Ian Brady in Longford (2006), a BAFTA nomination for playing Ian Dury in Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll (2010), the BAFTA Award for Outstanding British Contribution To Cinema in 2020, and a Daytime Emmy Award in 2021 for The Letter for the King.
Andy Serkis made his directorial debut with Breathe (2017), distributed by Bleecker Street. He then directed and starred in Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle (2018) for Netflix, and directed Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021) for Sony. He is also set to direct The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum for Warner Bros. Pictures, currently expected on the 17th of December 2027.
Andy Serkis read the entirety of The Hobbit on VE Day during the COVID-19 lockdown and raised more than £283,000 (around $351,000) for NHS Charities Together and Best Beginnings. More than 650,000 people tuned in worldwide. He later recorded a professional audiobook of The Hobbit, released in the UK on the 3rd of September 2020.
After Serkis played Gollum in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, producer Barrie M. Osborne campaigned for him to receive an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor nomination. New Line Cinema's marketing director Russell Schwartz compared Serkis's situation to John Hurt winning Best Actor while wearing a latex mask in The Elephant Man. The debate resurfaced when 20th Century Fox ran a high-profile campaign for Serkis's work as Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), with co-star James Franco publicly calling him the "undisputed master" of motion capture acting.