Rick Moranis

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Rick Moranis
Moranis at the 62nd Academy Awards, 1990
Born	Frederick Alan Moranis April 18, 1953 (1953-04-18) (age 56) Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Occupation	Actor, Comedian, Musician
Years active	1976 — 2006

Frederick Alan "Rick" Moranis (born April 18, 1953) is a retired Canadian comedian, actor and musician. Coming to prominence in the 1980s on Second City Television, before moving on to appearances in several Hollywood films including Ghostbusters; Spaceballs; Little Shop of Horrors; Honey, I Shrunk the Kids; Little Giants; Parenthood; and My Blue Heaven.

In 1996-1997, Moranis announced that because he had other obstacles in his life, he would retire from acting, though he occasionally does voice-over work.

Biography

Early life

Moranis was born in Toronto, Ontario, and went to high school at the Sir Sandford Fleming Secondary School. He went to elementary school with Geddy Lee, frontman of the rock band Rush.

SCTV

He followed that with his work at SCTV, enjoying particular success portraying "Bob" of Bob and Doug McKenzie. Doug was played by Canadian actor Dave Thomas.

His other SCTV characterizations include motor-mouthed film producer Larry Siegel, terminally ill rock star Clay Collins, smooth-voiced VJ Gerry Todd, pop star Linsk Minyk from the fictional country Leutonia, kid-brother amateur comic Skip Bittman, head cheese butcher Carl Scutz, and morning homily intellect Rabbi Karlov.

Feature films

The handprints of Rick Moranis in front of The Great Movie Ride at Walt Disney World's Disney's Hollywood Studios theme park.

After his SCTV work, Moranis had a busy film career that lasted over a decade. In a 2004 interview, Moranis talked about the kinds of films he enjoyed the most:

Retirement

He left the film industry in the late 1990s, a few years after the 1991 loss of his wife Anne to liver cancer. He later explained that he "pulled out of making movies in about '96 or '97. I'm a single parent and I just found that it was too difficult to manage raising my kids and doing the traveling involved in making movies. So I took a little bit of a break. And the little bit of a break turned into a longer break, and then I found that I really didn't miss it".^[2]

The producer of the 2008 Ghostbusters video game said Moranis had retired because he felt like it.^[3]

As of 2004^[update], Moranis was on the Advisory Committee for the comedy program at Humber College.^{[citation needed]}

In 2005, Moranis released an album entitled The Agoraphobic Cowboy, featuring country songs with lyrics which Moranis says follow in the comic tradition of songwriters/singers such as Roger Miller, Kinky Friedman, and Jim Stafford. The album was produced by Tony Scherr, and is distributed through ArtistShare, as well as Moranis' official Web site. Commenting on the origins of the songs, he said that in 2003, "out of the blue, I just wrote a bunch of songs. For lack of a better explanation, they’re more country than anything. And I actually demoed four or five of them, and I'm not sure at this point what I’m going to do with them—whether I’m going to fold them into a full-length video or a movie. But, boy, I had a good time doing that".^[1]

On December 8, 2005, The Agoraphobic Cowboy was announced as a nominee for the 2006 Grammy for Best Comedy Album. (A previous album by Moranis was entitled You, Me, The Music, and Me (1989)). On February 3, 2006, Moranis performed Press Pound on Late Night with Conan O'Brien and discussed the development of his music career.

In November 2007, Moranis reunited with Dave Thomas for a 24th anniversary special of Bob and Doug McKenzie, titled Bob and Doug McKenzie's 2-4 Anniversary. The duo shot new footage for this special. Thomas subsequently created a new animated Bob and Doug McKenzie series, Bob & Doug, for his company Animax Entertainment. Moranis declined to voice the role of Bob, which was taken over by Dave Coulier, but remains involved in the series as an executive producer.^[4]

On June 24, 2008, Moranis declined to come out of retirement to join the other cast members of Ghostbusters in the production of a new video game based on the films.^[3] The following year, Ghostbusters Harold Ramis told Entertainment Weekly of a proposed Ghostbusters 3 that, "Everybody said they'd do it".^[5] However, Ramis later stated to Student Life "Rick won’t do it. Rick has retired from show business. But everyone else says they’ll do it." ^[6]

Discography

Albums

• The Great White North (1981)
• You, Me, the Music and Me (1989)
• The Agoraphobic Cowboy (2005)

Filmography

Audio/Video

• Rock Radio Scrapbook 1973, with a RealAudio clip of Rick Allen from June 1973
• Rick Moranis Radio Interview with Chris Comer & Rob Ervin April 18, 2006

References

External links

• Rick Moranis at the Internet Movie Database
• Moranis ArtistShare projects
• Rick Moranis, Singing 'Cowboy', a December 2005 story from Weekend Edition
• OpEd Piece by Moranis from the NY Times website
• Rick Moranis Interview Proton Charging May 27, 2006