Brad Morris knows exactly when he was first bitten by the acting bug. At age six, he went to see "Dr. No" at a theater in his hometown of Johannesburg. Sean Connery's first appearance as James Bond so mesmerized the boy that he decided, right then, that acting would be his dream job. But first, there were other obligations. He finished school and fulfilled South Africa's mandatory requirement of two years service in the military. After qualifying as a drill instructor and marksman in the army, Morris left a cushy administrative job to become a bouncer in nightclubs.

Already a trained and gifted martial artist as a young man, Morris learned to box and combined his skills for success as a professional kickboxer. A prolific talent agency took notice and booked Morris for small roles on television and in American action movies being filmed in South Africa. He supplemented his acting jobs with stunt work which Morris calls, "the greatest schooling any actor could have for movement in front of a camera."

Ironically the young actor's first big break did not happen in front of the camera. It came to him on the theatrical stage when Morris was cast in the premiere foreign production of Alan Bowne's controversial play, "Beirut." The provocative work depicts a United States that quarantines its citizens who have been stricken by an epidemic resembling AIDS and segregates them from healthy members of the populace. The play's diseased central character is sentenced to a remote corner of New York, an analogy to war torn Beirut, where he is isolated from his girlfriend. Morris toured with "Beirut" for months and developed a passion for stage acting while he excelled in meeting the physical, emotional, and artistic demands of Bowne's challenging play.

Still the screen remained his goal, so Morris came to America in 1990 with little money in his pockets and big dreams in mind. Leaving South Africa was not an easy choice. He abandoned an emerging stage career, and there was a wrenching personal development. A former girlfriend suddenly and secretly left South Africa with his two infant daughters and separated him from his children. As Morris embarked on the challenges of a Hollywood career, he also began a long struggle to locate the two daughters who had been taken from him.

Hollywood's penchant for casting foreign actors as second tier baddies brought Morris more disappointments, but he triumphed in "American Kickboxer 1" as villainous Jacques Denard, a relentlessly self-promoting middleweight champ. Described by a sports announcer as "the man the crowds love to hate," Denard blocks the "boos" of scornful fans by plugging in his Walkman and dancing indifferently around the ring. He taunts competitors by erupting into a rock star, wearing loud arena gear and distracting them with mercurial punches before overcoming them with direct hits. To win matches, Denard doesn't break the rules. He reinvents them.

Almost too big a villain for a single four-cornered ring, Denard presents an actor with lots of opportunities to chew the scenery. Shrewdly avoiding any over-acting traps, Morris brings Denard to life at a perfect pitch that never reduces the character to a martial arts stereotype. The talented actor certainly displays Denard's flamboyance, but he also allows the audience to see the volatility and insecurities that drive and finally defeat him. Morris' performance elevates "Boxer" far above Hollywood's usual arena angst sagas. He also contributed to the film as its assistant fight choreographer, but it's Morris' range and intensity as an actor that make multiple viewings of the movie compelling and assure its frequent showings on television over a decade after its original release.

Before Morris championed Denard, he also demonstrated a talent for comedy in other action themed movies, notably the Patrick Swayze science fiction vehicle "Steel Dawn." Playing a futuristic henchman teamed with Arnold Vosloo, Morris pursues an innocent boy across an apocalyptic desert where Swayze waits to save the day. Defying the legendary rule that actors should never play opposite children or animals, Morris wins the scene when he loses a funny stand-off to Swayze's pet dog.

In the early nineties, Morris was finally pursuing his "Dr. No" vision of being a film actor, but he had not gotten the echo of live applause out of his system. So, in 1994, he returned to New York where he focused on work as an actor in experimental theater and off Broadway productions. He has also become a popular group fitness instructor and personal trainer. All the while, he continued an agonizing search of fifteen years for his daughters Tahnee and Tiffany until, finally, they found one another through the internet. Morris' reunion with his grown daughters has inspired him to focus on a return to screen acting with renewed determination. Anyone with the good fortune to catch his "Kickboxer" performance will be cheering him on.

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Brad Morris

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