Hollywood actor and producer Hugh Michael Jackman, who has won the hearts of his fans with his acting, is celebrating his 53rd birthday today.  Jackman had his breakthrough role playing Wolverine in Bryan Singer’s 2000 film ‘X-Men’, a superhero film based on the Marvel Comics team of the same name.

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Co-starring Patrick Stewart, James Marsden, Famke Janssen and Ian McKellen, the film tells the story of a group of mutants, whose superhuman powers make them distrusted by normal humans. The role was originally written for Russell Crowe who instead suggested Jackman for the part.

Jackman previously said that his wife advised him against taking on the role, as she found it “ridiculous”. He initially studied wolves to develop his character, as he thought that Wolverine alluded to wolves.

Wolverine was tough for Jackman to portray because he had few lines, but much emotion to convey in them. To prepare, he watched Clint Eastwood in the ‘Dirty Harry movies’ and Mel Gibson in ‘Mad Max 2’.

“There were guys who had relatively little dialogue, like Wolverine had, but you knew and felt everything. I’m not normally one to copy, but I wanted to see how these guys achieved it,” he said in one of the interviews.

Jackman reprised his role in 2003’s ‘X2, 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand’, and the 2009 prequel ‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine’, where Troye Sivan played the younger version of James Howlett. He also cameoed as Wolverine in 2011’s ‘X-Men: First Class’. He returned for the role of Wolverine again in 2013’s ‘The Wolverine’, a stand-alone sequel taking place after the events of ‘X-Men: The Last Stand’.

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In 2015, Jackman announced that the 2017 sequel to ‘The Wolverine’ titled ‘Logan’ in which he would  play the role for the final time. It earned him the Guinness World Record of ‘longest career as a live-action Marvel superhero’.