Lance James Henriksen (photo ©Gage Skidmore) was born on May 5, 1940 in New York, USA.
Raised by his moher after his parents divorced when he was only 2 years old, Lance Henriksen had a turbulent growth with trouble in the schools he attended and also some problems with justice. Despite this, he served for three years in the U.S. Navy and subsequently had various jobs around the world. He was mainly a painter, and his first contacts with acting came while he was painting and building scenarios in a theater.
In 1970 Lance Henriksen had the opportunity to join the cast of a stage play for which he had painted the scenarios with the complication that he was illiterate. Gradually he learned to read, also thanks to the scripts of the works in which he started finding roles, in theater, television and cinema. He started having important roles such as in James Cameron’s 1982 movie “Piranha II: The Spawning”. Cameron thought of him to play the cyborg in “Terminator” (1984), a role that eventually went to Arnold Schwarzenegger leaving Henriksen a minor role. The actor had other opportunities to work with Cameron in his movie “Aliens” (1986), a role that somehow linked him to that saga, given that he also had roles in “Alien³” (1992) and in “AVP: Alien vs. Predator” (2004). Another important role of those years was in the movie “Near Dark” (1987).
In the 1990s Lance Henriksen found many more roles in television and movie productions, among which the movies “The Pit and the Pendulum” (1991), “No Escape” (1994), “Dead Man” (1995) stand out, and others that include some distributed directly on the home video market. At that time he reached the pinnacle of fame in television when Cris Carter created the TV show “Millennium” thinking of him as the protagonist. The show ran for three seasons and he was nominated for a Golden Globe for three straight years. The show had a sort of ending in an episode of “The X-Files”.
After the end of “Millennium” Lance Henriksen kept on having more or less important roles in cinema and television. In some TV shows he was a recurring character, particularly in “The Blacklist”. He has become more active as a voice actor working at animated movies and TV shows such as “The Legend of Korra” and “TRON: Uprising”. In some cases he starred in commercials.
Despite his intense activity, Lance Henriksen managed to publish the autobiography “Not Bad for a Human – The Life and Films of Lance Henriksen”, to be co-author of the comic book series “To Hell You Ride”, and to continue his activity as an artist. In his private life he was married three times and had a total of four children. Thnking about the problems he had in the first part of his life, he achieved a lot!
