Steven Seagal (born April 10 1951) is an American action movie actor, producer, writer, director, martial artist, singer-songwriter, spiritualist and activist.

Seagal belongs to a generation of movie action hero actors including Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dolph Lundgren, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Chuck Norris and Bruce Willis which featured in many of the Hollywood blockbuster action films of the late 1980s and 1990s.

A 6 ft 4 in (193 cm) 7th-dan black belt in aikido, Seagal began his adult life as an aikido instructor in Japan, and became the first foreigner to ever own and operate an aikido dojo in Japan in Osaka . He later moved to the Los Angeles, California area where he made his film debut in 1988 in Above the Law. Since then, Seagal has become a globally recognized action star, mainly due to his action films of the 1990s such as Under Siege (1992) and Under Siege 2 (1995) where he played Navy SEALs counter-terrorist expert Casey Ryback. In total his movies have earned more than $2 billion worldwide.

Seagal has used his fame as an action star to cross over into other industries. He is also a recording artist and guitarist and the founder of Steven Seagal Enterprises. In addition to his professional achievements, he is also known as an environmentalist, an animal rights activist and, like other actors such as Richard Gere, is a supporter of Tenzin Gyatso the 14th Dalai Lama and the cause of Tibetan independence. Spiritualism and Buddhism plays an important role in Seagal's life and he has been recognized by Tibetan lama Penor Rinpoche as a reincarnated Tulku (Chungdrag Dorje). According to Seagal in a November 2006 interview "I was born very different, clairvoyant and a healer".

Steven Seagal is a striking and somewhat boyishly handsome looking (often with ponytail) and usually impeccably dressed action star who burst onto the martial arts film scene in 1988 in the fast-paced Warner Bros. production Above the Law (1988). The enigmatic Seagal commenced his martial arts training at the age of seven under the tutelage of well known karate instructor and author Fumio Demura, and in the 1960s commenced his aikido training in Orange County, California, under the instruction of Harry Ishisaka. Seagal received his first dan accreditation in 1974, after he had moved to Japan to further his martial arts training. After spending many years there honing his skills, he achieved the ranking of a 7th dan in the Japanese martial art "aikido" and was instructing wealthy clients in Los Angeles when he came to the attention of Hollywood power broker Michael Ovitz. Ovitz saw star value in the imposing-looking Seagal. The high-octane action movie genre was in full swing in the late 1980s, and Seagal's debut movie, Above the Law (1988), was wildly received by action fans and actually received some complimentary critical reviews. He followed up Above the Law (1988) with another slam-bang thriller, Hard to Kill (1990), as a gunned-down cop who revives from a coma to strike back at the mob. The movie also starred Seagal's wife at the time, leggy Kelly LeBrock, who was married to him from 1987 to 1996 and is the mother of three of his children. His next outing was battling voodoo-using Jamaican drug "posses" in the hyper-violent Marked for Death (1990), before returning to fight psychotic mob gangster William Forsythe (I) in the even more punishing Out for Justice (1991). Seagal was by now enormously popular, and his next movie, the big-budgeted Under Siege (1992), set aboard the battleship USS Missouri and also starring Tommy Lee Jones and Gary Busey, was arguably his best film to date, impressing both fans and critcs alike. Seagal's fighting style was rather different from that of other on-screen martial arts dynamos, such as Bruce Lee (I), Chuck Norris and Jean-Claude Van Damme, who were predominantly fighters from striking arts background such as karate or tang soo do. However, aikido is built around using an opponent's inertia and body weight to employ various locks, chokes and holds that incapacitate him. Seagal carries himself differently, too, and often appears wearing Italian designer clothes and usually favors an all-black outfit, generally with a three-quarter-length coat with an elaborate trim. Additionally, Seagal's on-screen characters were often seemingly benign or timid individuals; however, when the going gets rough they reveal themselves to be deadly ex-CIA operatives, or retired Special Forces soldiers capable of wholesale destruction! As his box office drawing power grew, Seagal began to influence his film projects to reflect his personal and spiritual beliefs, especially concerning the abuse of the environment. He appeared as an oil fire expert who turns against his corrupt CEO (played by Michael Caine (I)) in On Deadly Ground (1994) to save the Eskimo population from an oil disaster; in Fire Down Below (1997) he plays an environmental agency troubleshooter investigating the dumping of toxic waste in Kentucky coal mines, and in the slow-moving Patriot, The (1998/I) he plays a medical specialist trying to stop a lethal virus unleashed by an extremist group. Action fans struggled to come to terms with social messaging being built into bone-crunching fight films; however, Seagal's box office clout remained fairly strong, and more traditional chopsocky projects followed with the "buddy cop" film Glimmer Man, The (1996), then almost a cameo role as a Navy SEAL alongside CIA analyst Kurt Russell (I), before Seagal is sucked out of a jet at 35,000 feet in Executive Decision (1996). In 1999 Seagal took a different turn in his film projects with the surprising genteel Prince of Central Park (2000), about a child living inside NYC's most famous park. He returned to more familiar territory with further high-voltage, guns-blazing action in Exit Wounds (2001), Half Past Dead (2002), Out for a Kill (2003) (V) and Belly of the Beast (2003) (V) . Unbeknownst to many, in 1997 Seagal publicly announced that one of his Buddhist teachers, His Holiness Penor Rinpoche, had accorded Seagal as a tulku, the reincarnation of a Buddhist Lama. This initial announcement was met with some disbelief until Penor Rinpoche himself gave a confirmation statement on Seagal's new title. Seagal has repeatedly discussed his involvement in Buddhism and how he devotes many hours studying and meditating this ancient Eastern religion. While his box-office appeal has somewhat declined from his halcyon blockbusters of the mid-'90s, Seagal still has a very loyal fan base in the action movie genre and continues to remain a highly bankable star.