Actor Keanu Reeves was born in Lebanon to an English mother and a Chinese-Hawaiian father ("keanu", pronounced key-an-oo, is Hawaiian for "cool breeze over the mountains"). By the time he was two, Reeves had been in virtually every country in the world. He ended up in Canada as a teenager, where he briefly attended Toronto's High School for the Performing Arts, then studied at Second City. His first paid appearance was on a Canadian TV show; his first film was 1986's The River's Edge. Reeves rocketed to stardom as an air-headed, air-guitar-playing teenager in the amiable comedy/fantasy Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989). He could have remained in this zoned-out vein for the rest of his career, but Reeves was determined to prove his versatility--which he did time and again, with excellent performances in Dangerous Liasons (1989), Point Break (1991) and the Kenneth Branagh version of Much Ado About Nothing (1992). Nothing could have been farther from the amiable teen in the Bill and Ted pictures than Reeve's compelling portrayal of a gay hustler in My Own Private Idaho (1989). In 1994, Keanu Reeves rather unexpectedly became a pumped-up action star in the runaway hit Speed--unexpected, that is, to those who were unaware that Reeves had been a high-school hockey MVP. Since then, Reeves has continued to appear in a variety of films roles ranging from a kindly AWOL husband who helps a troubled pregnant woman in A Walk in the Clouds (1995) to a young agent with a computer chip and a time bomb inserted into his head in Johnny Mnemonic (1995) to a drawling Southern lawyer in The Devil's Advocate (1997).