Mark Wahlberg

American musician and actor, the younger brother of Donnie Wahlberg of New Kids on the Block fame. As a teen, he followed his brother's lead and formed a rap group called Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch. In late 1991 he released his first album, "Music for the People," gritty songs of urban street life. Donnie, 22, funded the album which he co-wrote and produced, even singing some of the backup vocals. For live gigs and the video, they had five dancers and a deejay known as Funky Bunch. He and Donnie were the youngest of the family's nine kids; the folks divorced in the early '80s. The kids stayed with their mom in Dorchester, Massachusetts, where they roamed the streets getting into fights and pulling off petty crimes. Mark had an arrest record of five or six busts, including a 45-day prison term for assaulting a Vietnamese man in 1988 and a brawl in 1993 after calling one of Madonna's friends a "homo." He was staying out all night by the time he was 12 and heavily into cocaine by 14. He stole cars, sold pot and got high on angel dust during his bad-boy days. Tired of not being taken seriously in the music industry, as well as the hype and grind associated with it, Wahlberg began making films. His film debut came in the Penny Marshall comedy "Renaissance Man," which was followed by "The Basketball Diaries," April, 1995. His image became familiar everywhere for dropping his pants, showing off shorts that he was advertising and a nice young-man-chest. A few years later he was still dropping his pants in a film about the porno industry, "Boogie Nights." "Boogie Nights," however, was a departure for Wahlberg to more serious cinema and a more serious career. The film was nearly epic, covering seven years of the rise and fall of a porn star in two hours; Wahlberg gave the most substantial performance of his career. Since then he has hooked up with George Clooney in the action flick "Three Kings" opening October 1999, a second movie, "Perfect Storm," 2000 and a projected third movie, "Metal God." For recreation, he bar-hops with his pal Leo DiCaprio and dates a different girl every night. September 2, 2003 was a day of emotional extremes for the actor. At about 4 AM at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles, his girlfriend Rhea Durham gave birth to their first child, daughter Ella Rae. Hours later, Wahlberg received a call informing him that his older sister Debbie, who had been admitted to a Boston, MA hospital for what seemed to be a kidney stone, had died, apparently of a heart attack. He and Durham welcomed a son on March 22, 2006 in Los Angeles, CA. The child is the couple’s second. Durham and Wahlberg married on August 1, 2009 in Hollywood, CA. Link to Wikipedia biography