Mark Robert Michael Wahlberg (born June 5, 1971) is an American actor, rapper and producer of film and television. He was known as Marky Mark in his earlier years and became famous in his 1991 debut as a rap musician with the band Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch.

Born in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, he is the youngest of nine children, with siblings Arthur, Jim, Paul, Robert, Tracey, Michelle, Debbie (died in 2003 at age 44), and Donnie born to Alma Elaine (née McPeck), a bank clerk and nurse's aide, and Donald E. Wahlberg, a Teamster who worked as a delivery driver. His parents divorced in 1982. Wahlberg had a Catholic upbringing and attended Copley Square High School (but never graduated) on Newbury Street in Copley Square in Boston. The campus now houses Muriel Snowden International School.

As a teenager, Wahlberg was implicated in several acts of violence and vandalism. At fifteen, he was amongst a group who threw rocks at a group of African American school children on a field trip while shouting racial epithets; the rocks hit their targets and caused several injuries. The following year, Wahlberg robbed a pharmacy while he was under the influence of PCP. During the commission of the crime, he again used racial epithets. He knocked one middle aged Vietnamese man unconscious and permanently blinded another in one eye before he was arrested by the police. Wahlberg was tried as an adult and charged for attempted murder. Pleading guilty to the lesser charge of assault, he was sentenced to two years in jail at Boston's Deer Island House of Correction, of which he served 45 days. In yet another incident, the 21-year-old Wahlberg fractured the jaw of a neighbor in an unprovoked attack.