Dan Aykroyd is a Canadian comedian, actor, screenwriter, musician. He was an original cast member of Saturday Night Live, an originator of The Blues Brothers (with John Belushi) and Ghostbusters and has had a long career as a film actor and screenwriter.

Aykroyd was born on July 1, 1952, at the Ottawa General Hospital in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. He grew up in the Canadian capital, where his father, Samuel Cuthbert Peter Hugh Aykroyd, a civil engineer, worked as a policy adviser to Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. His mother, Lorraine Helene (née Gougeon), is a secretary of French Canadian origin. His brother, Peter, also became a comedy actor. Aykroyd was born with syndactyly (webbed toes), which was revealed in the movie Mr. Mike's Mondo Video and in a short film on Saturday Night Live (Don't Look Back In Anger). He was also born with heterochromia (a condition of having two differently coloured eyes). His right eye is green and his left eye is brown.

Aykroyd's great-grandfather, Samuel Augustus Aykroyd (1855–1933), a dentist, had been a mystic and had been involved in Spiritualism, which Aykroyd would have a great interest in, stating that "all that stuff was hanging around the old farmhouse I grew up in, so I was kind of steeped in it".

Aykroyd was raised in the Roman Catholic Church, and had intended to become a priest until the age of seventeen. He attended St Pius X and St Patrick's, and was briefly expelled from the latter because he had dressed up a pig to look like the pope and took it to school for show and tell. He went on to study criminology and sociology at Carleton University but dropped out before completing. He worked as a comedian in various Canadian nightclubs and ran an after-hours speakeasy (Club 505) in Toronto for several years.

One of the most vibrant comic personalities of the 1970s and '80s, as well as a noted actor and screenwriter, Dan Aykroyd got his professional start in his native Canada