Giancarlo Giuseppe Alessandro Esposito was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, to an Italian carpenter/stagehand father from Naples and an opera-singing African-American mother from Alabama. His parents, working in Europe at the time of his birth, settled in Manhattan by the time he was six, and that's where he grew up.

Coming from a theatrical background, it was, perhaps, inevitable that young Giancarlo would appear on stage sooner or later, and he did, at age 8, appearing on Broadway as a slave child in "Maggie Flynn" in 1966.

More Broadway work followed through the '60s and early-'70s, followed by some small roles in movies. TV work followed in the 1980s with increasingly significant parts in a string of high profile series until he became well established as a character player both on TV and in a number of movies.

He came very much to the public's attention playing Agent Mike Giardello in the TV series "Homicide: Life on the Street" in 1998 and since then has rarely been off our screens.

Name: Giancarlo Esposito