Dan Aykroyd

He grew up in the Canadian capital, where his father, Samuel Cuthbert Peter Hugh Aykroyd, a civil engineer, worked as a policy adviser to Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. His mother, Lorraine Hélène (née Gougeon), is a secretary. His mother was of French Canadian descent and his father of English ancestry. His brother, Peter, also became a comedy actor. Aykroyd was born with syndactyly, or webbed toes, which was revealed in the movie Mr. Mike's Mondo Video and in a short film on Saturday Night Live titled "Don't Look Back In Anger." He was also born with heterochromia – his right eye is green and his left eye is brown.

Aykroyd's great-grandfather, Samuel Augustus Aykroyd (1855–1933), a dentist, had been a mystic and had been involved in Spiritualism. This would greatly interest Aykroyd, who stated: "All that stuff was hanging around the old farmhouse I grew up in, so I was kind of steeped in it." This is cited as having motivated him, at least partially, to take a hand in the writing of, and star in, both of the two Ghostbusters films and, later, to serve as the "host" of Psi Factor: Chronicles of the Paranormal. (See below for more details about each.) Read Less