Dan Aykroyd, who first achieved stardom as a gifted mimic and impersonator in the original crew of television's Saturday Night Live, has gone on from there to become one of the busiest actors in Hollywood, with twenty-four films to his credit since 1979. In his early pictures, Aykroyd was usually paired with his close friend and fellow Saturday Night Live alumnus John Belushi, but Belushi's death in 1982 in no way derailed Aykroyd's film career, and he went on to costar in such comedies as Trading Places, Ghostbusters and Dragnet. Not merely a talented comedian, Aykroyd received an Academy Award nomination as best supporting actor in Bruce Beresford's critically acclaimed film Driving Miss Daisy (1989). A gifted screenwriter as well, Aykroyd has collaborated on the scripts for five of his films, including The Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters and Dragnet, and in 1991 he made his directing debut with Nothing But Trouble, for which he also wrote the screenplay.
Daniel Edward Aykroyd was born in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada on July 1, 1952. His father, Samual Cuthbert Peter Hugh Aykroyd, who can trace his British ancestry back to a fourteenth-century police constable, was a civil engineer who, before he became a private consultant, rose to the rank of Canada's assistant deputy minister of transport. Of French-Canadian descent, Dan Aykroyd's mother, Lorraine (Gougeon) Aykroyd, was an executive secretary in the Canadian government. Aykroyd has a younger brother, Peter, also an actor and writer, who followed him into the cast of Saturday Night Live and into films.
Aykroyd had a strict Roman Catholic upbringing in Hull, Quebec. A hyperactive youngster, he was administered belt whippings by his parents in a futile attempt to ween him from mischief, and at fourteen he had to be bailed out by his father after being arrested for drunkenness in Messina, New York. Aykroyd took his first lessons in improvisational theatre when he was twelve and began playing the drums a year later. His first impersonations were of the nuns and priests who taught him at the prestigious St. Pius X Preparatory Seminary , from which he was expelled for committing acts of "minor" delinquency. After finishing his high school education at a coed Catholic school, Aykroyd entered Carleton University in Ottawa, where he continued his wayward behavior. In looking back on his high school and college years during an interview with Patricia Goldstone of Maclean's (March 24, 1980), Aykroyd admitted that he was a "loudmouthed, flagrant fool," though he also developed a strong work ethic during his teen years through a succession of summer jobs. At thirteen, he lied about his age to get a job unloading boxcars, and four summers later he worked on a road survey crew in the Northwest Territories. "To this day I still have that blue-collar mentality," Aykroyd told Doris Toumarkine for US (July 18, 1983).
At Carleton University, where he studied psychology, political science, and criminal sociology, Aykroyd was active in the college's Sock and Buskin Drama Guild, and he also played the harmonica (a skill he acquired during his summer in the Northwest Territories) in several bands. After leaving Carleton without a degree, he had a brief stint as a pitchman for cable television commercials (for which he made $35 a week); produces, cowrote and acted in a series of fifteen-minute comedy shows entitled A Change for a Quarter for a private cable television company; and cowrote and costarred in Coming Up Rosie, a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation children's show. He also found time to manage Club 505, a Toronto nightclub.
In 1972 Aykroyd joined the newly formed Toronto offshoot of Second City, the renowned Chicago-based improvisational comedy troupe, in which his colleagues included the future Saturday Night Live performers Bill Murray and Gilda Radner. In 1974 he joined Second City's original company in Chicago, where his best-known impersonation was of Richard Nixon selling automobiles. Aykroyd's career took off in 1975, when producer Lorne Michaels, an acquaintance from his Toronto Second City Days, to be one of the performers on NBC's new late-night series, Saturday Night Live (the show was originally titled NBC's Saturday Night in order to avoid confusion with Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell, an ABC prime-time offering that made its debut at the same time.) Presented live from New York City three times a month, the ninety-minute production featured topical and satirical sketches and monologues, in addition to a weekly musical guest. The show's original cast, who dubbed themselves the "Not Ready for Prime Time Players," included John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Chevy Chase, Jane Curtin, Garrett Morris, and Laraine Newman, as well as Dan Aykroyd.
Over the next four years, Aykroyd became, in the words of Brian D. Johnson, who profiled him for Maclean's (June 26, 1989), "the chameleon of the cast." In addition to performing wildly exaggerated impersonations of Nixon, Jimmy Carter, cooking show host Julia Child, and talk show host Tom Snyder, Aykroyd created such memorable characters as E. Buzz Miller, the sleazy host of a public-access cable television show, and Leonard Pinth-Garnell, the prudish host of "Bad Theatre." He also created and performed in one of Saturday Night Live's best-known running skits, "The Coneheads," which hilariously recounted the adventures of a family of aliens with cone-shaped heads. But it was Aykroyd's partnership--both personally and professionally--with John Belushi that put the stamp on his career. Of his first meeting with Belushi in 1973, Aykroyd told Doris Toumarkine, "As soon as we met there was an instant rapport. It was like Stanley meeting Livingstone." During the first few months of Saturday Night Live, Aykroyd commuted between the set of Love at First Sight, his first motion picture, then being filmed in Canada, and New York City, where he shared a Greenwich Village appartment with Belushi and his girlfriend, Judy Jacklin.
During the second season of Saturday Night Live, Aykroyd and Belushi, in addition to performing, began writing sketches together. Saddled with a work load that Aykroyd later said, "without exaggeration...required a seventy-two-hour week," Aykroyd and Belushi often holed up for days at NBC's Rockefeller Center studios, where they took an office together and had bunk beds and a shower installed nearby. They spent their time trying out new gags and sketches on each other and tossing frozen pizzas, Frisbee-style, onto the the Radio City ice-skating rink below. In 1977, following its second season, the Saturday Night Live writing staff won an Emmy for best writing in a comedy-variety or music series. But as Lorne Michaels pointed out to David Michaelis of Esquire (December 1982), Aykroyd and Belushi, though compatible, were far from being the ideal writing team. "John was never patient as a writer; Danny was meticulous," Michaels recalled. "John didn't have the attention span for writing a sketch, whereas Danny would stay there until he died for it."
Aykroyd and Belushi occassionally took week-long cross-country car trips, during which they created new characters for Saturday Night Live. On one such trip, Aykroyd, a longtime fan of the blues, introduced Belushi to that style of music, and the two developed the semi-facetious act known as "The Blues Brothers," in which they donned sunglasses and dark suits, ties, hats, and shoes (reminiscent of the manner in which blues musicians of the late 1940s dressed) and sang rhythm-and-blues songs, with Aykroyd also playing the harmonica. The pair unveiled the act in 1977. At first designed to "warm up" the Saturday Night Live audience before the telecast, it was later incorporated into the show itself. Response to the Blues Brothers turned out to be so enthusiastic that Belushi and Aykroyd were booked in September 1978 to serve as the opening act for Steve Martin during his engagement at the Universal Amphitheater in Los Angeles. Three months later, they released their first album, Briefcase Full of Blues, which sold more than two million copies and won a Grammy nomination. The Blues Brothers followed that success with a ten-city tour, during which they recorded the live album Made in America. In 1980 the duo made a twenty-five city tour and released their third and final album, Best of the Blues Brothers.
While opening for Steve Martin, Aykroyd and Belushi learned that they had won coveted roles in director Stephen Spielberg's forthcoming movie, 1941. Belushi had already scored a success with National Lampoon's Animal House (1978), but Aykroyd's film experience was limited to the unsuccessful Love at First Sight, in which he played a blind man who marries into a family of Canadian rednecks. After attending the film's Toronto opening, the reviewer for Variety (July 20, 1977) wrote, "Only the most juvenile mind would find this attempt at comedy even remotely interesting...It is hamstrung by heavy-handed acting by Dan Aykroyd." Aykroyd and several other Saturday Night Live cast members had small parts in both All You Need is Cash (1978), a made-for-television film that parodied the Beatles, and Mr. Mike's Mondo Video (1979), a feature film that spoofed the 1963 Italian documentary Mondo Cane.
Revolving around the panic that overtook Los Angeles in the days immediately following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, 1941 (1979) cast Aykroyd in the role of a gung-ho tank sergeant and Belushi as a monomaniacal National Guard pilot. Although the film cost some $40 million , it was a major critical and box office flop. Aykroyd next took their rhythm-and-blues act to the big screen with The Blues Brothers (1980), for which Aykroyd cowrote the script with John Landis, who also directed. The $28.5 million musical comedy, in which Aykroyd and Belushi played the outlawed singing duo of Elwood and Jake Blues, also featured singing performances by Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Cab Calloway, and James Brown. Although The Blues Brothers met with mostly negative reviews, it was one of the year's highest-grossing pictures.
Largely because of Aykroyd and Belushi, Saturday Night Live's viewership had grown to some twenty-five million by its fourth season. In September 1979, just before the start of its fifth season, the two stars announced that they were leaving the show to devote all their time to their movie and recording careers. (In 1986 Aykroyd reprised his work on the show by releasing two videos: The Best of Dan Aykroyd, a compilation of fifteen Saturday Night Live sketches in which he appeared, and One More Saturday Night.) In Neighbors (1981), their next film, Aykroyd and Belushi exchanged personas, with Belushi playing a straight-arrow suburbanite and Aykroyd depicting his overbearing next-door neighbor. Critics were not amused. Writing in his syndicated column in the New York Daily News (December 21, 1981), Rex Reed dismissed Neighbors as "a slimy, vulgar piece of trash," and Richard Corliss of Time (January 18, 1982) contended that Aykroyd and Belushi "maneuver through this minefield on literal flat feet, turning the Blues Brothers into the Two Stooges."
On March 5, 1982, John Belushi died of a drug overdose at the age of thirty-three. In discussing his loss with Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune (July 29, 1982), Aykroyd said: "More than missing the work we might have done together, I miss him--a friend whom I could call any time of the day or night. He was always happy to see me and I was always happy to see him. There was very little friction between us. I can't think of any argument that ever lasted for more than twenty-four hours. It was one of the great friendships of the decade, if not the century, and it will go down as such, I think."
Aykroyd was one of five comedians (the others being Gilda Radner, John Candy, and Cheech and Chong) to introduce and narrate clips from atrocious movies for the anthology It Came from Hollywood (1983). The death of Belushi failed to sidetrack Aykroyd's film career. Between 1983 and 1985 he appeared in eight movies, the first of which was Doctor Detroit (1983) in which he played a meek college professor who leads a double life as a Chicago mobster. In his review of Doctor Detroit in the New York Times, (May 6, 1983), Vincent Canby remarked that this film "is in no way a classic in itself but it's often amusing in the way it makes use of routines so familiar that they seem classic...Mr. Aykroyd has a good, low-key comic personality that serves this sort of thing well up to a point. However, his apparent intelligence prevents the film from ever turning into inspired lunacy." In the opinion of Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune (May 6, 1983), Doctor Detroit "is a mess, but a genial mess...As for Ayrkoyd, Doctor Detriot represents a major step in his career...Aykroyd the performer smiles at us in Doctor Detroit, and in the film's many goofy, entertaining scenes, we can't help but smile back." And Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times (May 6, 1983) called Aykroyd's performance " a constant, inventive delight."
Aykroyd scored the first major critical success of his film career with Trading Places, in which he portrayed a wealthy commodities broker who, as part of an environment-versus-heredity bet, switches roles with a penniless con-man played by Eddie Murphy. Richard Schickel of Time (June 13, 1983) reflected the prevailing critical opinion when he called Trading Places "one of the most emotionally satisfying and morally gratifying comedies of recent times." Although Murphy received most of the credit for the film's success, Aykroyd was also singled out by several reviewers, including David Ansen of Newsweek (June 13, 1983), who credited him with being "more successful at creating a screen character than he has been before." More effusive was Rex Reed, who in his New York Post review of June 8, 1983 wrote: "I expected another trashy Dan Aykroyd farce. Instead I got a film with real wit and imagination, populated by interesting and genuinely amusing characters, and featuring the most consistently sustained piece of acting Aykroyd has yet managed in feature film...He is splendid." Aykroyd's other 1938 film credit was a cameo in Twilight Zone: The Movie, an anthology featuring remakes of three episodes of the classic 1969s television series and one new story. His next film role was also of the cameo variety, in the adventure yarn Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), Steven Spielberg's sequal to his hit 1981 film, Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Dan Aykroyd's film career moved into high gear with the release in June 1984 of the hugely successful horror-comedy Ghostbusters. Written by Aykroyd and Harold Ramis and produced and directed by Ivan Reitman, an old Toronto acquaintance of Aykroyd's, the film was originally conceived as an Aykroyd-Belushi vehicle called Ghostsmashers. Following Belushi's death, the movie was recast and Bill Murray and Ramis were hired to costar with Aykroyd in a story about a trio of parapsychologists who roam Manhattan trapping evil spirits. In his highly complimentary review of Ghostbusters for New York (June 11, 1984), David Denby called it "a convulsively funny mock horror film" and "a classic comedy." Dan Aykroyd, Denby noted, "is at his most boyishly sincere; this is his sweetest and gentlest performance." The highest-grossing film of 1984, Ghostbusters also stood for several years as the top-grossing comedy of all time, a distinction that now belongs to the 1990 film Home Alone.
After playing supporting roles in the comedies Nothing Lasts Forever (1984) and Into the Night, Aykroyd costarred opposite another Saturday Night Live alumnus, Chevy Chase, in the comedy-adventure Spies Like Us (1985), on which he also earned a cowriting credit. The film, which deals with a pair of American Foreign Service officers recruited to serve as decoys in a spy mission, aroused little critical enthusiasm. Reviewing Spies Like Us in Newsweek (December 16, 1985), Jack Kroll contended that "Chase and Aykroyd are character comics who need strong writing, and they don't get it from the screenplay." Equally unimpressed was Kathleen Carroll of the New York Daily News (December 6, 1985), who found that Aykroyd and Chase "all but die on the screen." Aykroyd next cowrote and costarred in Dragnet (1987), a parody of the long-running television crime series of the 1950s and 1960s. As Joe Friday, the namesake nephew of the straitlaced detective sergeant played by Jack Webb in the series. Aykroyd garnered some excellent notices. "With his tongue planted firmly in his cheek, Dan Aykroyd gives the performance of his career," Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune (June 14, 1987) informed his readers. In his appraisal of Dragnet for Films and Filming (February 1988), Ian Johns wrote that "Aykroyd's deadpan performance is splendid." But reviews of the film itself varied widely. Although Dave Kehr of the Chicago Tribune (June 26, 1987) termed it "surprisingly fresh and warm-hearted," and "a funny and affectionate character comedy," Mike McGrady of New York Newsday (June 26, 1987) downgraded Dragnet for being a "one-joke" comedy.
The Couch Trip, a farce about the psychiatric profession, was one of the first of four movies in which Dan Aykroyd apppeared in 1988. As an escaped mental patient who masquerades as a psychiatrist and becomes a popular radio call-in sex therapist like Doctor Ruth Westheimer, Aykroyd was the film's sole redeeming virtue, in the opinion of most reviewers. "Even when the material slides off into predictable routine," Vincent Canby of the New York Times (January 15, 1988) commented, "he carries on with such manic energy that one is laughing with him and not at it." Chris Chase of the New York Daily News (January 15, 1988) bestowed a three-star rating on The Couch Trip, largely because of Aykroyd's performance. "The plot is sheer bedlam," she conceded. "Even a five-year-old couldn't suspend disbelief. But it brings back the great ...Aykroyd of Saturday Night Live, as free and loony as they come." The Great Outdoors, Aykroyd's second 1988 film venture, paired him with John Candy in the story of two drastically unlike brothers-in-law who vacation with their families at a Wisconsin lakeside resort. While a critic for Variety (June 22, 1988) reported that "the Aykroyd-Candy pairing is charmed, with both creating a convincing sense of family despite their wide differences," Janet Maslin of the New York Times (June 17, 1988) was less taken with Aykroyd's contribution: "Mr. Aykroyd, as the high-rolling brother-in-law of the two, wears an Elvis impersonator's hairdo but otherwise hasn't much to do."
Aykroyd's other two 1988 film credits likewise did little to advance his career. In Caddyshack II, the unsuccessful sequel to the hit 1980 comedy, he portrayed rather annoyingly in the opinion of most critics, a deranged ex-Marine. "Aykroyd has never been so awful," complained Rita Kempley of the Washington Post (July 22, 1988), "his ineptitude eclipsed only by the direcor Allan Arkush's." My Stepmother is an Alien (1988), Aykroyd's next effort, cast him as a socially backward widowed scientist who, by botching an experiment, upsets the gravitational system of a distant planet, prompting its leaders to send a beautiful young woman (Kim Basinger) to earth to find the culprit. Critics found it difficult to be charitable about the film or Aykroyd's performance. Kathleen Carroll of the New York Daily News (December 10, 1988) granted that Aykroyd's character was "sweetly absentminded" but added that "he's no more fun to watch than your average couch potato." In her evaluation of Aykroyd's performance for Films and Filming (April 1989), Ann Lloyd remarked that he "has always had a nimbleness of movement and humor, but they have disappeared here."
Ghostbusters II (1989), the sequel to the smash hit of 1984, reunited the cast of the original. Like that film, it was written by Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis and produced and directed by Ivan Reitman. This time, Aykroyd, Murray, and Ramis try to rid New York of an underground river of pink slime generated by the buildup of negative energy among the city's inhabitants. While not as commercially successful as its predecessor, Ghostbusters II was the fifth-highest grossing film of 1989, and it received generally favorable reviews as well. Among the pictures supporters was Hal Hinson of the Washington Post, who in his review of June 16, 1989 wrote: "Usually, there's an arrogance in sequel makers. They know they've got you, regardless of what's up on the screen, and he result is often listless and routine, filmmaking by rote. The results here, though, are just the opposite. It's better-looking than the first production...and less mechanical (the gags aren't as programmed or as dependent upon special effects)."
In his first dramatic role, Aykroyd played, in Driving Miss Daisy (1989), the son of an elderly, well-to-do southern widow sensitized, over a twenty-five-year period, to the civil rights struggle through her relationship with her black chauffeur. "Dan Aykroyd, shedding his smart-ass comic persona, is fine as Daisy's long-suffering son, Boolie," wrote a critic for Variety (December 13, 1989). "Pulling off the difficult task of growing from young manhood to late middle age, Aykroyd is a sympathetic audience surrogate figure, yet a man whose liberal instincts can't quite transcend the limitations of time and place." Aykroyd, who won an Oscar nomination as best supporting actor for his peformance, told by Jay Scott of the Toronto Globe and Mail (December 9, 1989), "I play a Jewish character and I'm not Jewish, but I am half French-Canadian and I went to an English school in Hull, so I was always getting beat up; I understand racial hatred and mistrust." Driving Miss Daisy captured four Academy Awards, including one for best picture.
Aykroyd teamed up with Gene Hackman in Loose Cannons (1990), a police comedy in which he played a schizophrenic forensic scientist. In reviewing the film for the New York Times (February 9, 1990), Vincent Canby admitted that he found Loose Cannons "not entirely comprehensible." Each actor, Canby explained, "gives a thoroughly professional performance that is consistently undercut by the direction." Masters of Menace (1990), a satire of motorcycle films in which Dan Aykroyd and James Belushi (John's younger brother) had small parts, also failed to arouse much critical enthusiasm.
Aykroyd made his debut as a director with the comedy Nothing But Trouble (1991), a film for which he also wrote the screenplay. In Nothing But Trouble a New York couple wander off the New Jersey Turnpike on their way to Atlantic City and wind up in a bizarre small town where they encounter a series of odd characters, including a justice of the peace who holds speeding motorists hostage, and his grandson, a hairless mutant (both played by Aykroyd). Although Nothing But Trouble grossed an impressive $6.9 million in the first two weeks of its release, it failed to impress the critics. In this unflattering review for People (March 4, 1991), Ralph Novak called the film "hopelessly confused," adding, "The credits say the film was directed by Aykroyd, but it doesn't seem to have been directed so much as allowed to happen....Aykroyd's script runs to banal lines in which people describe what they've done."
Aykroyd's most recent screen credit came in the bittersweet coming-of-age story My Girl (1991), in which he portrayed Harry Sultenfuss, a mortician and the widowed father of an eleven-year-old girl. Critics expressed little enthusiasm for the film or Aykroyd's performance. Writing in the Chicago Tribune (November 27, 1991), Dave Kehr voiced the opinion that My Girl's "aesthetic interest is virtually nil," with performances that are "strictly lightweight and superficial." After criticizing the movie's "awkward pace," Janet Maslin of the New York Times (November 27, 1991) wrote that Dan Aykroyd, because of his "rotund and rather hangdog" appearance, "makes a very unlikely romantic lead." And writing in the Toronto Globe and Mail (November 28, 1991), Rick Groen labeled My Girl "a pseudo-sensitive package--brightly wrapped and blatantly manipulative," though he found the performances of Aykroyd and his costar, Jamie Lee Curtis, to be "fine." In October 1991, Aykroyd was signed by Richard Attenborough to appear in his forthcoming film, Chaplin, in which his fellow performers are to include Robert Downey, Jr., Kevin Kline, Geraldine Chaplin, and Diane Lane.
Dan Aykroyd stands six feet tall and has brown hair. The actor's distinctive voice was described by Brian D. Johnson in his Maclean's profile as having "the reinforced calm of a newscaster." Aykroyd and the actress Donna Dixon, who worked with him in Doctor Detroit, have been married since April 29, 1983. They have a daughter, born in 1989, and live in the Santa Monica Moutains, near Los Angeles, although they spend two to three months a year in Ontario. A police buff, Aykroyd rides a motorcycle that he bought from the Ontario provincial police, collects police badges, sometime rides shotgun with detectives in squad cars, and is part-owner, with several Toronto police officers, of a Toronto bar called Crooks. He is also one of the owners of the Hard Rock Cafe in Manhattan. Aykroyd drew on his other major avocational interest, the supernatural, when cowriting the scripts for the two Ghostbusters movies, and he owns an extensive collection of books on the subject. He told Brian D. Johnson, "I've never seen a full apparition, but I once saw what could be termed ectoplasmic light, and that scared the hell out of me." Aykroyd, who lists as his favorite comedians Jerry Lewis, Jackie Gleason, Peter Sellers, and the Three Stooges, seldom grants interviews and reveals little about his personal life, even to his colleagues. "Frankly, I wish I had the money and not the fame," he told Johnson. "I can't understand a guy like Donald Trump. He's got all the money in the world but he stills loves the high profile. I don't believe in low profile; I believe in no profile."
Current Biography, January 1992.
Transcribed by L. Christie