Marc Alan Dacoscos

"The Chairman" in Iron Chef America on Food Network, the fictional nephew of Takeshi Kaga, "Chairman Kaga" of the original Japanese series of Iron Chef programs.

Mark Alan Dacascos was born on February 26, 1964 in Honolulu, Hawaii. He is an accomplished martial artist as well as an actor. Mark’s father, Al Dacascos, is a martial arts instructor which afforded Mark an exposure to martial arts at an early age. Mark won several Kung Fu and Karate championships between the ages of 9 and 18.His father, Al Dacascos, is from Hawaii and is a martial arts instructor of  Filipino ancestry. His mother, Moriko McVey, is of  Irish and Japanese ancestry.

He is married to actress Julie Condra who starred with him in Crying Freeman. Dacascos became an actor after being discovered walking down the street in San Francisco's Chinatown by two men working for director Wayne Wang. Though Dacascos' first scenes ended up on the cutting room floor, he has gone on to establish a film and television career mostly playing martial artists. His breakout role was in the 1993 film  Only the Strong, in which he played Louis, a Capoeira master who takes a high school's potential failures and turns their lives around by teaching them the venerable Brazilian martial art. He also performed in three video games: voice acting in Stranglehold, live acting in Wing Commande IV: The Price of Freedom and digitally recreating The Chairman in the new Iron Chef video game for Wii. He was nominated for the Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actor in 2002 for his role in Brotherhood of the Wolf, which was a box office success in the United States. He appeared in the short-lived but critically-acclaimed television series The Crow: Stairway to Heaven which was a follow-up to the 1994 film The Crow. He has was also featured in an action film Cradle 2 the Grave, in which he squared off against Jet Li.