Timothy Francis Robbins (born October 16, 1958) is an American actor and filmmaker. He is known for portraying Andy Dufresne in the film The Shawshank Redemption (1994), and has won an Academy Award and two Golden Globe Awards for his roles in the films The Player (1992) and Mystic River (2003). Robbins's other roles include starring as Lt. Samuel "Merlin" Wells in Top Gun (1986), Nuke LaLoosh in Bull Durham (1988), Erik in Erik the Viking (1989), Ed Walters in I.Q. (1994), Nick Beam in Nothing to Lose (1997) and Senator Robert Hammond in Green Lantern (2011). He also directed the films Bob Roberts (1992) and Dead Man Walking (1995), both of which were well received. He received an Academy Award nomination for Best Director for Dead Man Walking. On television, Robbins played Secretary of State Walter Larson in the HBO comedy The Brink (2015), and in Here and Now (2018) portrayed Greg Boatwright. Robbins was born in West Covina, California, and raised in New York City. His parents were Mary Cecelia (née Bledsoe), a musician, and Gilbert Lee Robbins, a singer, actor, and manager of The Gaslight Cafe. Robbins has two sisters, Adele and Gabrielle, and a brother, composer David Robbins. He was raised Catholic. Robbins moved to Greenwich Village with his family at a young age while his father pursued a career as a member of a folk music group called The Highwaymen. Robbins started performing in theater at age twelve and joined the drama club at Stuyvesant High School (Class of 1976). He spent two years at SUNY Plattsburgh and then returned to California to study at the UCLA Film School, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Drama in 1981. Robbins's acting career began at Theater for the New City, where he spent his teenage years in their Annual Summer Street Theater and also played the title role in a musical adaptation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince. After graduation from college in 1981, Robbins founded the Actors' Gang, an experimental theater group, in Los Angeles with actor friends from his college softball team, as well as John Cusack. In 1982, he appeared as domestic terrorist Andrew Reinhardt in three episodes of the television program St. Elsewhere. In 1985, he guest-starred in the second episode of the television series Moonlighting, "Gunfight at the So-So Corral". He also took parts in films, such as the role of frat animal "Mother" in Fraternity Vacation (1985) and Lt Sam "Merlin" Wells in the fighter pilot film Top Gun (1986). He appeared on The Love Boat, as a young version of one of the characters in retrospection about the Second World War. His breakthrough role was as pitcher Ebby Calvin "Nuke" LaLoosh in the baseball film Bull Durham (1988), in which he co-starred with Susan Sarandon and Kevin Costner. Robbins's amoral film executive in Robert Altman's film The Player (1992) was described by Peter Travers in Rolling Stone as "a classic performance, mining every comic and lethal nuance in the role of his career". He won the Best Actor Award at Cannes. He made his directorial and screenwriting debut with Bob Roberts (also 1992), a mockumentary about a right-wing senatorial candidate. Todd McCarthy in Variety commented that the film is "both a stimulating social satire and, for thinking people, a depressing commentary on the devolution of the American political system". Robbins then starred alongside Morgan Freeman in The Shawshank Redemption (1994), which was based on Stephen King's novella.