Rise to Fame
Andy Serkis wore a tracking suit and played Gollum from the inside out. The Lord of the Rings cast filmed against him on location; the animators replaced his body with CGI, using his voice and every physical performance as the blueprint. Producer Barrie Osborne campaigned for a Best Supporting Actor nomination. The Academy passed. That snub became the opening argument in a debate about whether motion capture counts as acting, one Serkis has been winning technically for over twenty years while losing at the podium.
In the Spotlight
Three mo-cap campaigns, zero Oscar nominations. After Gollum, Caesar in the Planet of the Apes trilogy ran from 2011 to 2017 with another full studio push. Still nothing. Warner Bros. eventually handed him something better: he's both directing and starring in The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum, due December 2027. He spent fifteen years trying to get an Animal Farm adaptation made; that's finally happening. The man who couldn't get a Best Supporting Actor nod is now the person behind one of the bigger franchise bets of the decade.
Side Notes
His father was an Iraqi-Armenian gynecologist who worked across the Middle East, so Serkis had regular holidays in Baghdad and Damascus growing up. The family's original name was Sarkisian. At Lancaster University he studied visual arts, and his first serious ambition was painting. He met his wife, actress Lorraine Ashbourne, doing repertory theatre in Manchester and married her in 2002. None of this comes up much next to the CGI, but it tracks: someone that invested in the craft of making things visible would spend two decades insisting the body inside the tracking suit is the actual art.