Mark Robert Michael Wahlberg (born June 5, 1971) is an Academy Award-nominated, BAFTA Award-winning American actor and television producer. He was known as Marky Mark in his earlier days and became famous in his 1991 debut as a rap musician with the band Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch.

Born in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, he is one of nine children, with siblings Arthur, Jim, Paul, Robert, Tracey, Michelle, Debbie, and Donnie Wahlberg. His mother, Alma Elaine (née Donnelly), was a bank clerk and nurse`s aid, and his father, Donald Edward Wahlberg, was a Teamster who worked as a delivery driver; the two divorced in 1982. Wahlberg is of Swedish, Irish and French Canadian descent. Wahlberg had a Catholic upbringing and attended Copley Square High School (but never graduated) on Newbury Street in Copley Square in Boston. The campus now houses Muriel Snowden International School.

As a young teenager, Wahlberg described himself as a troubled child who often participated in acts of violence and vandalism. He later claimed to have been in trouble 20-25 times with the Boston Police Department as a youth. By the age of thirteen Wahlberg had developed a serious addiction to cocaine and other substances. At fifteen he harassed a group of African American school children on a field trip by throwing rocks (causing injuries) and shouting epithets. When he was sixteen (again using racist language) after robbing a pharmacy under the influence of PCP, Wahlberg knocked a middle aged Vietnamese man unconscious with a wooden stick, left another Vietnamese man permanently blinded in one eye, and attacked a security guard. Wahlberg has said that he has no recollection of the incident because he passed out just before the police caught him. For these crimes, Wahlberg was charged for attempted murder, pled guilty to assault, and was sentenced to two years in jail at Boston`s Deer Island House of Correction, of which he served 45 days. In yet another incident, a 21-year-old Wahlberg fractured the jaw of a neighbor in an unprovoked attack.

Wahlberg first came to fame as the younger brother of Donnie Wahlberg of the successful 1980s boy band New Kids on the Block.
Mark, at age thirteen, had been one of the group`s original members, along with Donnie, Danny Wood, Jordan Knight, and Jonathan Knight. Uninterested in the group`s bubblegum pop and squeaky-clean image, however, he soon quit. It was his departure that eventually allowed Joe McIntyre to take his place as the fifth member of the group.

Wahlberg began recording as Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch, earning a hit with "Good Vibrations" from the album Music for the People. The record was produced by brother Donnie and later hit #1 on The Billboard Hot 100. In the video, widely broadcast on music video channels, Mark was shown boxing, lifting weights and showing off his bare, well-muscled torso. Marky Mark opened for the New Kids on the Block during their last tour. The second Marky Mark LP, You Gotta Believe, was a relative failure. Wahlberg also collaborated musically with reggae / ragga singer Prince Ital Joe in a project featuring Marky Mark. The project combined rap and ragga vocals with strong eurodance music (as in the singles Happy People, United, Life in the Streets, and Babylon) courtesy of Frank Peterson and Alex Christensen as producers.

He briefly became embroiled in controversy when he appeared to endorse the homophobic comments made by

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