Born: Mark Alan Ruffalo on 22 November 1967, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, US.

Mark Ruffalo is an American actor of Italian and French Canadian descent. He was born in the industrial town of Kenosha, Wisconsin, the son of Marie Rose, a hairdresser and stylist, and Frank Lawrence Ruffalo, Jr., a construction painter. He has two sisters, Tania and Nicole, and a brother, Scott. Ruffalo spent his teen years in Virginia Beach, Virginia, where his father worked, graduating from First Colonial High School. He then moved with his family to San Diego, California and later to Los Angeles, California, where he took classes at the Stella Adler Conservatory and co-founded the Orpheus Theatre Company. With the OTC, he wrote, directed, and starred in a number of plays and spent the next nine years earning his living as a bartender.

Ruffalo had minor roles in films like The Dentist (1996), the low-key crime comedy Safe Men (1998) and Ang Lee's acclaimed Civil War Western Ride With the Devil (1999). Through a chance meeting with writer Kenneth Lonergan, Ruffalo began collaborating with Lonergan and appeared in several of his plays, including the original cast of This is Our Youth (1998), which led to Ruffalo's role as Laura Linney's troubled, aimless drifter brother Terry in Longeran's acclaimed, Academy Award-nominated 2000 film You Can Count on Me. He received favourable reviews for his performance in this film, often earning comparisons to the young Marlon Brando, and won awards from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and Montreal World Film Festival.

I want to do a western. Nobody does westerns anymore.

This led to other significant roles, including the films XX/XY (2002), Isabel Coixet's My Life Without Me alongside Sarah Polley (2003), Jane Campion's In the Cut alongside Meg Ryan (2003), Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), and We Don't Live Here Anymore (2004), which is based upon two short stories written by Andre Dubus. He appeared opposite Tom Cruise as a homicide detective in Michael Mann's acclaimed crime-thriller Collateral (2004).

More recently, Ruffalo has appeared as a romantic lead in "chick flicks" such as View From the Top (2002), 13 Going on 30 (2004), Just Like Heaven (2005) and Rumor Has It (2005). In March, 2007, he appeared in Zodiac as SFPD homicide inspector Dave Toschi, who ran the investigation to find and apprehend the Zodiac killer from 1969 through most of the 1970s. October 2007 saw Ruffalo play divorced lawyer Dwight Arno, who accidentally kills a child and speeds away, in Terry George's film Reservation Road based on the same titled novel by John Burnham Schwartz.

In 2006, Ruffalo starred in Clifford Odets's Awake and Sing! at the Belasco Theater in New York, for which he was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play.

Ruffalo has been married to French-American actress Sunrise Coigney since June of 2000, and they have three children: a son Keen, and two daughters: Bella and Odette.