Drake (musician)

Aubrey Drake Graham (born October 24, 1986), known professionally as Drake, is a Canadian rapper, singer, songwriter, and former actor based in Toronto, Ontario. He first achieved prominence for his role as Jimmy Brooks, a high school basketball player who becomes paralyzed after a shooting, on the teen drama series Degrassi: The Next Generation from 2001 to 2008.

Drake transitioned to music by independently releasing mixtapes starting with Room for Improvement in 2006 and achieving a breakthrough with So Far Gone in 2009, which included the top-ten single "Best I Ever Had". He signed with Lil Wayne's Young Money Entertainment label that year, leading to his major-label debut album Thank Me Later (2010), which topped the Billboard 200 chart. Follow-up releases such as Take Care (2011), Nothing Was the Same (2013), Views (2016), and Scorpion (2018) continued this success, with Take Care recently certified diamond by the RIAA in 2025 for 10 million units sold in the US.

Aubrey Drake Graham was born on October 24, 1986, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. His father, Dennis Graham, is an African-American drummer and musician originally from Memphis, Tennessee, who performed with artists including Jerry Lee Lewis, while his mother, Sandra "Sandi" Graham, is a Canadian of Ashkenazi Jewish descent employed as a teacher and later a florist.

Drake's parents divorced when he was five years old, after which he was raised primarily by his mother in the affluent Forest Hill neighborhood of Toronto; he spent summers visiting his father in Memphis and later dealt with his father's incarceration on drug-related charges during his teenage years. Due to his mother's Jewish heritage, Drake attended a Jewish day school, underwent a bar mitzvah ceremony, and participated in related cultural practices, though he has described his religious observance as minimal in adulthood.

He initially attended Forest Hill Collegiate Institute, a public high school in Toronto, where he played basketball competitively and showed early interest in performing arts. Drake later transferred to Vaughan Road Academy but dropped out during the 11th grade to pursue acting opportunities full-time.