Mat Fraser

Mat Fraser
Born	1962 England
Occupation	Musician, actor
Years active	1980–present
Spouse(s)	Julie Atlas Muz (2012–present)

Mat Fraser is an English rock musician, actor, writer and performance artist. He has thalidomide-induced Phocomelia.

He is also a martial artist having studied hapkido, taekwondo, and karate.

Between 1980 and 1995 Fraser was a drummer with several rock bands including "Fear of Sex," "The Reasonable Strollers," "Joyride," "The Grateful Dub," and "Living in Texas," who had a number one single in Italy. Fraser played the drums with Graeae Theatre Company's "Reasons to be Cheerful" at the 2012 Paralympics opening ceremony, where he also hosted the pre-televised section, and with Coldplay during the closing ceremony.

Fraser left drumming to join Graeae Theatre Company, Europe's leading disabled theatre company after their production of Ubu inspired him to change careers. Hie worked in forum theatre for Graeae for several months, then landed the part of Dr Prentice in Joe Orton's What the Butler Saw. He is now a patron of Graeae. Subsequent theatre roles in the '90s included the Group K production of Marisol and the title role in Johnny Sol at the Croydon Warehouse.

He wrote 2005's"Thalidomide!! A Musical", in which he and Anna Winslet played all the parts

His first major television role was in the three-part World War II drama series Unknown Soldier (ITV, 1998).

In 2009 he apppeared in Channel Four's Cast Offs, a six-part comedy-drama series satirising reality television . Fraser has been associated with the use of term "spacking up" to describe when a non-disabled actor plays the part of a disabled person rather than the part going to a disabled actor, as a play on "blacking up", used to describe the controversial practice where non-black actors take on the characters of black people. The term was actually coined by one of the show's writers, in the line "spacking up is the new blacking up''.

...
Wikipedia