Andy Serkis

Owns one of two prop rings used in "Lord of the Rings." The other went to Elijah Wood, who played Frodo Baggins.
Based the voice of Gollum on the sounds his cats made while coughing up furballs.
His performance as Gollum in "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy is ranked #10 on Premiere Magazine's 100 Greatest Movie Characters of All Time.
His last day of filming on the Lord of the Rings trilogy was only a few weeks before the theatrical release of Le seigneur des anneaux: Le retour du roi (2003). On the carpet of Peter Jackson's living room, they filmed the facial reaction of Smeagol/Gollum when he realizes Frodo intends to destroy the ring. The resulting video was e-mailed to Weta Digital so the animators could replicate the shot with the CGI character.
Born to Lylie (Weech), a British mother who taught handicapped children, and Dr. Clement Serkis, a gynaecologist (born in Iraq of Armenian descent) who opened a hospital in Baghdad and was briefly imprisoned under Saddam Hussein's regime, Andy attended St. Benedict's School, Ealing, London, a Roman Catholic school.

[on playing Gollum in Lord of the Rings:] "Everyone has their own interpretation of what he is, what he looks like and how he sounds. So it was up to me to just trust my own instincts."
"We didn't want to anthropomorphize him to the point where we were explaining every single little gesture. Gorillas, both in captivity and the wild, have an enigmatic quality - a sense of disconnect, of otherness" - on his title character in King Kong (2005).
I do feel incredibly liberated when I'm inside another's skin, basically, and so method does afford you that, hugely.
I've always been really in touch with my primal instincts. In my profession you have to be. You have to be open to going where your emotions take you. Acting is a sort of pressure cooker that allows the fizz to come out the top. God knows what I'd be like if I didn't have that. Even more animal, perhaps.
[on learning at 'ape school' how to walk and move like a simian, playing Caesar in La montée de la planète des singes (2011)] When you are watching yourself as an actor who has played a computer-generated role [King Kong], obviously you are looking to see if your performance has fully manifested itself on the screen, and if it contains all the original intention that was put there. And what I've seen,so far, has delighted me, because I know Rupert [Wyatt] has been devoted to try and push the emotional core of all the performances right through the post-production phase.