Former students
Below you will find a few extracts from press and other profiles of some of the best-known graduates of the Drama Centre. They are chosen to give you a sense of the range of work our graduates undertake, as well as of the wide range of backgrounds from which they come and of the various, sometimes unusual, routes they took towards training. As you will see, they are all united by their desire to approach their art sincerely while not taking themselves too seriously.
- Paul Bettany
- Russell Brand
- Pierce Brosnan
- Louisa Clein
- Anne-Marie Duff
- Colin Firth
- Tara Fitzgerald
- Tom Hardy
- Jack Maskall
- Helen McCrory
- Jack Shepherd
- John Simm
- Jamie Sives
- Polly Walker
- Stephen Wight
- Penelope Wilton
Paul Bettany
Despite the fact that he was raised in a theatrical family, acting was not Paul’s first choice of career. When he was small, his dad was a drama teacher and his mum a secretary. But both were former actors, and his dad is still on stage. He originally wanted to be a rock singer and drifted round London for a couple of years in his late teens, busking. “I wrote lots of songs, still do.” But he gave it up, he says, because he could never imagine bearing his soul as his hero John Lennon did, with lyrics like “Mother, you had me, but I never had you”. “I bless him for saying it, but I would never want anybody to know that much about me. Acting gives you the freedom to be behind a mask. Nobody knows if it’s really you.”
Paul trained at the Drama Centre between 1991 and 1994 – “Drama Centre taught me how to read!” Paul then made his stage debut in Stephen Daldry’s acclaimed production of An Inspector Calls. Early stage successes also saw him spending a year with the Royal Shakespeare Company. He followed that with a number of stage, television and film appearances before his career really took off with Gangster No 1, followed soon after by his first big Hollywood movie the rocked-up medieval romp A Knight’s Tale. He went on to world recognition with his performance in A Beautiful Mind; a central role in Dogville - a three hour marathon co-starring Nicole Kidman and directed by the Danish film maker Lars von Trier. He gained wide acclaim for his key role in the film Master and Commander, opposite Russell Crowe, winning a BAFTA nomination for Best Film Actor; an Evening Standard Best British Actor Award and a Film Critics Circle Best Actor Award. Most recently he starred in The Reckoning and in Wimbledon.
Paul is very good at not taking things too seriously. I am very confident that the quality of his acting will allow him to get away it. While shooting Master and Commander he reportedly opted out of the director’s mandatory tall ships’ drill for the cast. Everyone else was put through his paces for days, hoisting sails in their heavy naval costumes. Bettany showed up on set in shorts and t-shirt and sat in a corner smoking: his way, he claimed, of suggesting his character’s intellectual distance from the ship’s crew. But also, you imagine, a good way to sit in the corner smoking.
(Extracted from The Evening Standard Metro Life February 6-12, 2004 and The Observer Magazine January 25, 2004)
Russell Brand
Striding along a Hawaiian beach Russell Brand cuts an incongruous figure. With his rangy frame wrapped in skin-tight rock-and-roll clothes, he looks like a well-manicured Edward Scissorhands. The dandyish 32-year-old is visiting the island of Uahu to promote his first major Hollywood film. Forgetting Sarah Marshall, a bittersweet comedy produced by Judd Apatow, the man behind “The 4O-year-Old Virgin” and “Knocked Up”. Brand steals the movie. "Really? Am I the talk of the town?” he laughs when I tell him this. "But which town? Nuneaton? Stockport? Will the people of Stockport finally stop denying their interest in me? At last!”
Once the film opens, it’s likely that Brand will be the talk of Tinseltown as well. He has already enjoyed small roles in the British-made “St. Trinian's” and in the Christina Ricci vehicle “Penelope”, but this is his first big part in a Hollywood film.
“Aldous Snow (his character in the film) is not an unsavoury arch-rival,' Brand says.”He's actually quite pleasant although he's a twit; a self-consumed rock star. He’s a hedonistic, decadent, pseudo-spiritual rock star, which is an archetype that I’ve always found funny. Obviously there are crossovers with myself, being a recovering drug addict. Also, a lot of my mates are musicians, so I can draw on that, too. So is Aldous Snow’s character very close to his off-screen persona? “Of course Aldous is close to me” he says. “But aren’t all good movie stars close to their real selves, like Jack Nicholson? … Honestly, I’m quite good at transformative acting, and this whole thing of mine – well, it is a character really.”
Brand attended both the Italia Conti stage school and the Drama Centre (between 1995-98). “I really got trained at Drama Centre, where Paul Bettany, Colin Firth and Pierce Brosnan went”. His first big break came with his own show on MTV, which attracted many celebrity guests, including Tom Cruise, Christina Aguilera and Adam Sandler. Brand was eventually sacked for coming to work dressed as Osama Bin Laden on September 12, 2001. A period in rehab followed before he found his current success.
Though he accepts that he has become well known for Big Brother, stand-up is really his thing - he loves being on stage, working an audience. "It's the best thing in the world," he says. "Better than sex. It's like salvation, like redemption – hurling myself into an audience and being accepted as shamanistic. It feels incredibly liberating. "Does he aim to outrage? "No I aim just to be myself and say what I believe in. And if an inadvertent consequence of that is outrage, then that's all right." I tell him I think he divides people, as Marmite does. "People who hate me need to look inside themselves," he says. "I've learned from Tupac Shakur, really - you should just fuck the haters. And eventually I'll get round to all of them." (I think he means fuck, as in fuck, not fuck as in ignore.) Has he ever felt any animosity? "Never, people are beautiful to me. Unbelievable."
Sunday Telegraph April 12 2008 and The Guardian Weekend September 9 2006
Pierce Brosnan
Pierce Brosnan was born in Navan, Ireland in 1953, but moved to London with his family in 1964. He left school at 15 “I was one of the lads, I was sarf London, y’know, but somehow I felt different. All my mates were going off to be painters or plumbers, but I kind of invented myself to be a commercial artist and then I found acting…When I found acting I found a certain refuge…sanctuary…home…sense of belonging.”
While at the Drama Centre between 1973 and 1976, Pierce appeared in Fuente Ovejuna well before the National Theatre put the Lope de Vega play back in the public eye back in 1989; was Brachiano in Webster’s The White Devil and appeared in the German dramatist Gerhart Hauptmann’s little known 1911 The Rats. Soon after leaving Drama Centre he undertook professional theatre work at the Glasgow Citizens Theatre, worked in repertory and took a role in Franco Zeffirelli’s Saturday, Sunday, Monday in the West End. In 1981 Pierce went to Hollywood and in 1995, after a distinguished career in film and television, he became the 5th actor to play James Bond.
“At the Drama Centre we were taught the discipline of the job and the responsibilities you have as an actor. The Drama Centre was my university, my church, my salvation. Before I went there, I’d done some fringe theatre and, in my ignorance and youth, I thought I was above it all – but I really didn’t know anything. When I am on a set with some director who is rudderless and ill-prepared, I hear the words of my teachers coming back to me. The most important lesson they ever taught me is that you will never be directed. The great directors, the good ones, are few and far between, so you’d better be prepared to direct yourself.
You were challenged to investigate yourself, to educate yourself – it was not for the faint-hearted, but if you survived Drama Centre, you could survive any ordeals in your career.
(Extracted from The Independent on Sunday January 27, 2002 and the Evening Standard January 22, 2002)
Louisa Clein
Graduating in 2000, Louisa went straight into a BBC drama called Judge John Deed. Four years later, with a fourth series promised, it has provided invaluable experience in front of a camera, exposure and opportunities. In between filming, Louisa has worked in the theatre on play such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Jack Shepherd, My Children! My Africa! directed by Dana Fainaru (both alumni of the Drama Centre) and most recently The Lady From The Sea at the Almeida Theatre directed by Trevor Nunn. For this latter role she was nominated for an Ian Charleson Award – the most prestigious national award for actors under 30. Louisa has completed filming a 6-part Granada TV programme called Island at War.
“I guess if there is one thing I can say I have learnt about Drama Centre since graduating, is that Drama Centre is everywhere! It’s quite incredible what an influence it has had and is still having on theatre, TV and film both in Europe and across the Atlantic. Drama Centre actors are exciting to watch, exciting to work with and I feel enormously proud to have Drama Centre on the top of my CV.”
Anne-Marie Duff
Anne-Marie is well on her way to becoming that modern curiosity: a serious actress whose growing prominence is founded on quiet years of graft. Recently she starred in Shameless, Channel 4’s clever, quirky drama by Paul Abbott. But Anne-Marie’s big breakthrough came in 2002 with the film The Magdalene Sisters, in which she gave a powerful performance as Margaret. Peter Mullan’s film won Best Picture at the Venice Film Festival and the UK Film Critics Award for Best Film.
Herself the product of a council estate and a comprehensive education, she adored shooting Shameless, an aggressively funny play about family bonds on a Manchester housing estate. Anne-Marie was born in 1970, the younger of two children of Irish immigrants, her father worked – and works still – as a painter and decorator; her mother in a shoe shop. The family lived on the Southall estate in West London and Anne-Marie, the archetypal, shy, preoccupied child, attended a local youth theatre in order to do battle with her nature. “I was quite shy. I used to write stories all the time and I think that was a worry for my parents. They thought attending a youth drama group might make me a bit more extrovert.” Anne-Marie soon became hooked on the stage.
In her mid-teens, involved in an amateur theatre company, she began to think seriously about applying to drama schools. Her first application was rejected. “At the time, I was desperately unhappy about it, but I just wasn’t polished. I got too nervous in the audition. It wasn’t a world I was familiar with…” So she went away and did some more A levels and studied Film and Theatre Studies. “I felt I would be more articulate, better-versed when it came to re-applying.” At 19 she ended up alongside John Simm, Anastasia Hille and her good friend, Paul Bettany at the Drama Centre – “A very intense training, quite relentless and brilliant” - at which point everything came into sharp focus. She felt at home there almost immediately. “Everyone had the same want, and that’s a relief. If you really crave something, it’s a relief to meet people who are like-minded…It was exhilarating, but a tough training. If there had been a yearbook, I’d have been the person least likely to succeed. There were so many sexy, talented pupils there.”
Despite her misgivings, in 1993 it was Anne-Marie who walked straight out of drama school into touring theatre and then spent 3 years at the National Theatre, playing among others, Cordelia in King Lear opposite Ian Holm, for which she was nominated for an Ian Charleson Award. She has worked almost solidly since in the theatre, in television period dramas (The Aristocrats; The Way We Live Now) and in films and was nominated for an Olivier Award for her work in Collected Stories opposite Helen Mirren. Garry Hynes, who is currently directing her in the lead role in Playboy of the Western World at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin says: “She’s not careful of herself.” Howard Davies, who has directed her twice on the stage of the National Theatre, agrees: “She throws herself into the part, almost as if she is bruising herself against it.”
(Extracted from The Sunday Mail December 28, 2003 and The Observer February 8, 2004)
Colin Firth
Colin’s favourite showbiz anecdote concerns George Bernard Shaw’s visit to 1920s Hollywood to meet Sam Goldwyn. After 3 days, Shaw informed his host that they couldn’t possibly work together. But why, enquired the shocked movie mogul. “Because you’re only interested in art and I’m only interested in money”, replied Shaw. For Firth, that inversion of expected characteristics says everything about Anglo-American movie détente, and he has definitely crossed the Atlantic that separates cash and culture.
Colin Firth is the elder son of liberal academics, his father a lecturer in history and his mother in comparative religions, who raised their three children on books, conversation and no ITV on the television. As a child he spent a year in Nigeria, another in St Louis, where he was disliked and isolated at school. Neither of these interludes helped Colin assimilate at his hated secondary modern in Winchester. “I didn’t want to grow up and wear a suit. I wanted to be rock and roll.” His escape was Saturday drama classes, and then a place at the Stanislavsky-inspired Drama Centre. His teachers at the Drama Centre acclaimed their protégé as “a young Paul Schofield” and warned him of the moribund destiny of the matinee idol, which they could all too clearly see as a possibility. His was the only Hamlet the Drama Centre ever staged, remembered by one in the audience as “incredibly dark and glamorous”.
Colin Firth has worked consistently since leaving the Drama Centre in 1982 and walking straight into the play of the year, Julian Mitchell’s Another Country, in which he replaced Rupert Everett as the public-speaking proto-traitor Guy Bennett. “That fairy godmother never appears again. He dwarfs what ”Pride and Prejudice” felt like. I went from nobody knowing who I was and everyone doubting me to my dad taking photos of the poster on Finsbury Avenue.”
While he was being cast in Another Country his drama school contemporaries were doing less starry work and they assumed he would change overnight. “In the end I bought the drinks for a long time. I had to be humble.” Colin went on to star in such successes as Pride and Prejudice, Bridget Jones’s Diary, Shakespeare in Love, High Fidelity, Love Actually and The Importance of Being Earnest.
(Extracted from The Sunday Times Magazine May 2003)
Tara Fitzgerald
When I was one my parents took me to the Bahamas, where my maternal grandfather had set up a legal practice. My memories are of beautiful white sand and the sound of cicadas on the way to the beach. Then in 1970, when I was three, Mum split up with my father, Michael, and returned to London with me and my younger sister, Arabella. It was quite a shock. Everything felt cold, grey and dismal. My mother, Sarah Fitzgerald, is Irish and it was terribly difficult finding anywhere to live with two infants. I knew Mum and Dad weren’t together any more and that my father was an artist, had gone travelling around Central America. So my mum teamed up with my aunt and uncle, Caroline Fitzgerald, a theatre director, and Oliver Maguire, an actor. They agreed to live together and split the rent. Mum had left Dublin when she was 13 and knew the area around South Kensington. She found 7A Gledhow Gardens, a basement flat in an enormous white Victorian terrace. There were three or four people squatting in our flat, but the landlord dealt with them and they left. It was fantastic living with my aunt and uncle. They shared one room while my mother, Arabella and I had the big front room. It was all parquet flooring, and looked onto the Old Brompton Road where the Queen's guard used to parade at six every morning, We'd hear "clip-clop, clip-clop" and see the horses' hooves and legs. It was a child's view of the world: everything cut off at the knee.
I wanted to act from about four or five. There is an acting tradition in the family: my great-aunt, Geraldine Fitzgerald, had an extraordinary career and was in “Wuthering Heights” with Laurence Olivier. My uncle got me interested in Fred Astaire, listening to old records and watching musicals on television. I danced a lot although I couldn't do tap. Caroline was stage-managing shows in the West End. Oliver made me feel it was the most normal thing in the world to want to act. We used to dress up and do plays. We had a big communal garden where we were left to run around. I was a bit of a tomboy and fancied myself one of the lads. There was a gang called the Bully Boys who had Chopper bikes and played tricks on us. Once they asked me to kick a ball – but they had dug a ditch, covered it with sticks and leaves and put the ball on top so I fell down. It was one of my worst memories of the place. My sister was furious. . After that, when we saw the Choppers glinting in the light we knew we couldn't go out. While we lived there my mother met the actor Norman Rodway at a party: he was Irish and knew my aunt Caroline. We called him the Curly Wurly-man because after the theatre he used to bring us a Curly Wurly, which we loved. Mum and Norman decided they wanted to set up home together and we moved to Camden in north London when I was six.
From The Sunday Times, November 7 2004
Tara Fitzgerald studied at the Drama Centre between 1987-90. Soon after graduating she stared in the West End alongside Peter O’Toole in “Our Song”. Her subsequent career included numerous roles on British television, including “Six Characters in Search of an Author”, “The Chamomile Lawn”, “The Vacillations Of Poppy Carew”, “The Virgin Queen”, which also starred Anne-Marie Duff, and beginning in 2007, “Waking the Dead”. Her stage roles have included Blanche Dubois in the Bristol Old Vic 2000 production of “A Streetcar Named Desire”, and Ophelia (opposite Ralph Fiennes) in a 1995 production of “Hamlet”; for the latter she won a New York Drama Critics Circle Best Supporting Actress Award. In film she acted in the Academy Award nominated Czech movie “Dark Blue World” and was paired with Hugh Grant in “The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain” and “Sirens”. She also had major roles in “A Woman of No Importance”, “New World Disorder” and the film adaptation of Dodie Smith's “I Capture the Castle”.
Tom Hardy
Anyone who meets Tom knows that he is a nice middle-class boy from East Sheen with a very dark underbelly. 'Everything I've ever known is nice and lovely,' Hardy says, waving a heavily tattooed arm in the direction of the leafy streets outside his sitting-room window. 'Sheen is nice and lovely, my parents are nice and lovely, but I'm not nice and lovely. For as long as I can remember people have been telling me not to put my hand in the fire and, over and over again, I've done it.'
An only child, Edward Thomas Hardy was born in September 1979. On paper, he had an idyllic childhood. He went to good private schools where he excelled on the playing fields. But fairly early on in his school career he discovered that he 'didn’t like the rules'. What started with a few tattoos and a bit of smoking behind the bike sheds gradually became more ominous. Petty crime gave way to more serious violent behaviour and he repeatedly found himself in a police cell. 'I'm not proud of myself' he admits. 'But what happened, happened and I can’t change it now.' After an early career as a model (at the age of 19, he won The Big Breakfast's “Find Me a Supermodel” competition), he signed up for a foundation course at Richmond College for the Performing Arts. 'But I was thrown out for never turning up to classes’ grins Hardy, who ironically now teaches a six-week course in film acting to its students and 'loves every minute of it'. By the time he went to the Drama Centre [between 1998 and 2001], he had eased up on breaking the law, but was – he realises in retrospect - a full-blown drink and drug addict. What was his particular vice? 'Anything I could lay my hands on. You name it, I took it.' At first, his addictions didn't affect his career. Two years into his three-year drama degree, Hardy landed a part in “Band of Brothers”, swiftly followed by Ridley Scott's “Black Hawk Down” (in which he performed all his own stunts, including being set on fire). His big break came when he was offered the role of the villain in “Star Trek: Nemesis” (2002). By then, he was regularly bingeing. Hardy's low point came one morning in 2002 when he collapsed in Soho, and came round 'on Old Compton Street with a crack pipe, covered in blood and vomit'. With the support of his parents - to whom he has always been very close - Hardy checked himself into rehab. When he left several weeks later, he moved back home. But it was his work, he says, that was his salvation. 'The first job I did out of rehab was “In Arabia We'd All Be Kings”, in which I played a messed-up smack addict, 'he laughs. 'The opportunity to exorcise my demons, night after night, was a real gift.'
His conversation is saturated with confessional self-analysis. 'I'm grateful, arrogant, self-centred, tenacious, versatile, honest, honourable, loyal, loving, gentle, consistent, reliable, focused, prideful, passionate and nuts' reads his MySpace entry. 'I have a head like a disco ball.'
In every aspect of his life – most notably his work - Hardy seems to be hell-bent on bettering himself. ‘I’m definitely a better actor since I got clean,' he says. 'I'm really good at it, I know I am, but I also know that I've got a very, very long way to go. Being intense is easy. I can throw chairs and shout, but being intimate and sensitive is really hard for me.’
Others also think that he is really, really good. In the years since he first came to the public's attention in 2001's acclaimed HBO Second World War mini-series “Band of Brothers” - during which time he has amassed some 22 film and television appearances, not to mention five high-profile forays into theatre - Hardy has proved himself to be something unique: a handsome young British actor with much more to him than meets the eye. In all his most notable screen performances - as Robert Dudley in “The Virgin Queen”, Jack Rose in Granada's Second World War prison-break thriller “Colditz” and the villainous Shinzon in “Star Trek: Nemesis” - he has managed to excavate the sensitive soul that lurks beneath a swaggering arrogance. But it is on stage that Hardy has electrified audiences. In 2003 he was awarded the Evening Standard Theatre award for Best Newcomer for his performances in “In Arabia We'd All Be Kings” at the Hampstead Theatre and “Blood” at the Royal Court. 'Those whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first call Promising,' the then 26-year-old cautiously joked in an interview. He needn't have worried. 'Tom Hardy exudes sex appeal and a dangerous unpredictability,' said one newspaper theatre critic of his performance in Rufus Norris's production of “Festen” at the Almeida. Even in the damply received National Theatre production of George Etheridge's “The Man of Mode”, directed by Nicholas Hytner, he was singled out by another critic as 'utterly persuasive throughout'.
'Tom is a shape shifter,' says the director and close friend Robert Delamere, with whom he has worked several times. 'His best work is done when he is entering into a character that isn’t himself. 'He's essentially a character actor in a leading man's body'. 'See these,' Hardy says, curling back his full lips to reveal a mouthful of wonky teeth. 'These are the reason that I'll never have a career in Hollywood. 'Like his heroes Gary 0ldman, Sean Penn and Philip Seymour Hoffman, Hardy refuses to have them fixed. Whether he is rebelling, acting, exercising, falling in love, decorating his flat or doing an interview, Tom Hardy does it with intensity. 'I guess that I'm always looking for the next hit,' he admits.
From the Telegraph Magazine 2007
Jake Maskall
One week, Jake Maskall plays the East Enders' loveable rogue Danny Moon. The following week audiences at the Theatre Royal Windsor can see Jake, as a cold-blooded aristocrat.
It's starting to dawn on Jake Maskall that he is beginning to get typecast as 'a naughty boy'. But he's not complaining. Alter spending less than a year as Alfie Moon's wayward cousin in East Enders, he plays 'a bit of a naughty boy' in the film “Naked in London”, which comes out later this year. At the moment, he is touring the country as mass murderer Louis Mazzini in the Ealing comedy “Kind Hearts and Coronets”, which stops off at the Theatre Royal Windsor next week.
“Being naughty is always a lot more fun,” he said. “It’s an actor's dream to be rude and get away with it.” It doesn't come without hard work, however. "Everyone thinks of Alec Guinness's part in the film, when he played six characters, but I play the part played by Dennis Price and there are only three pages of the script when I'm not on stage. "l have never had such a demanding role. It really has been a feat. Louis is so different from Danny. He is debonair, a bit of a dandy and he has a very convoluted way of speaking. He uses very poetic language which I found very hard to learn”. Jake loves Ealing comedies, however. It’s a mood recreated by “The League of Gentlemen” and “Nighty Night” “That’s my kind of humour. It's twisted."
Having this job to come back to did take the pressure off Jake’s return to EastEnders, however. Jake attended Drama Centre between 1996-99. As an actor not long out of drama school, Jake was presented with ten lines to speak at the audition for Danny's part and it was up to him to give his interpretation. "It was lovely to have a free range. I am an actor and I wanted to create a character and that was brilliant.” "I was only supposed to be in it for six weeks and then die of cancer but, they loved what I had brought to the character so much that they extended it for another eight or nine months. Jake had been away for six or eight months before his return. It was lovely to go back and see everybody but this time it was very different because I did not feel so much pressure. I knew I had this job to come back to and the story line was quite mad so it was great fun to do. 'Although I've moved on, being in EastEnders was the greatest experience of my life really and I feel proud and privileged to be part of the EastEnders machine."
From the Daily Express March 24 2006
Helen McCrory
Thanks to her formidable range and presence, Helen McCrory, who graduated in 1990, is always being compared to Judi Dench. She is probably best known for playing Anna in a TV adaptation of Anna Karenina and for her recent appearance as the female lead in Charles II on the BBC. Amongst her fellow actors, her reputation, however, rests above all on stage performances, most recently as Nina in The Seagull at The National and Yelena in Uncle Vanya at The Donmar.
Helen studied at the Drama Centre in the late 80s and early 90s. “They rejected me at first, telling me I hadn’t lived enough. Undaunted, I went away to Italy for a year, then on my return I sent the Centre an envelope stuffed with photocopies of the letters I had written to other schools rejecting their offers of places. It did the trick.
It wasn’t just a foundation in acting,” McCrory remembers, “but a preparation for the job, which isn’t quite the same thing. It was a tough course, but it’s a tough profession. It teaches you to ask questions, how to look at yourself – which you need if you’re an actor – and how to keep constantly training yourself.”
Helen found Drama Centre’s focus on character analysis illuminating. “What you get are blueprints for work as an actor, which you can either reject or go with. When I was there, we learned 8 or 9 of the key approaches about acting, character analysis and psychology. Drama Centre is quite unique in that respect.
Drama Centre genuinely inspired me. It changed me in fact as a person, as well as an actress. Lots of people can act, but after a few years in work, there are so many genuinely unhappy people, because they hate being freelance or can’t take the criticism. At Drama Centre London you find out at 23 whether you have the stomach for criticism rather than at 45, as a card-carrying member of Alcoholics Anonymous.”
(Extracted from Time Out London May 2004)
Jack Shepherd
On a wet day, 60 years ago, the young Jack Shepherd was taken into the old Leeds Empire theatre by his grandma. She thought it a convenient place to shelter from the heavy rain. “That was it – I loved it. I was entranced,” Shepherd remembers.
A student at the Drama Centre in its earliest years, between 1963-5, Jack Shepherd was born in the Chapel Allerton area of Leeds. His family were “just about” working class, i.e. working class with the ambition to better themselves. His father loved the Liverpool comic Tommy Handley but loathed the notoriously vulgar Frank Randle. Now Shepherd has written “Only When I Laugh”, a play inspired by his love of music hall comedians. In it, Shepherd the writer examines the nature of working-class music hall heroes and the precarious relationship with the audience.
A writer and director as well as a distinguished actor, before embarking on an acting career Shepherd went to art school and has been writing since then. He has been interested in the whole process of a play from the very beginning. “It was that addiction that you develop at art school, to the blank piece of paper”, he explains. Then at College I wrote scenarios and revue sketches. I became just as interested in the acting of a play as I was in the construction of a play; the improvisation of a play and the directing of a play.”
From The Stage, April 2 2009
John Simm
John Simm will be familiar to television viewers from numerous films and series ranging from The Lakes, in which he played Danny Kavanagh, to Crime and Punishment, shown in 2003, in which he led as Raskolnikov. John first read Dostoyevsky’s novel when he was a student at Drama Centre, having arrived at the age of 19 from Nelson in Lancashire. “I came down from the north and I was surrounded by these people from Oxford and Cambridge who were extremely well read and that left me, you know… secluded. And I had to catch up. I had to be able to compete, so I read and I read and I read.” (The Guardian February 9, 2002)
He graduated in 1992. While at Drama Centre, John appeared in another Dostoyevsky piece, Camus’ adaptation of the novel The Possessed, alongside fellow students Craig Kelly and Joe Duttine. Film audiences will know him from Michael Winterbottom’s movie Wonderland, in which he appeared as Eddie. Most recently he played Cal McCaffrey, the journalist in the political thriller State of Play. Despite being one of the busiest of his generation of actors, he has time to appear with his band Magic Alex, which toured recently in support of Echo and the Bunnymen.
Jamie Sives
The quality of Jamie’s acting in films such as Wilbur and the Highland comedy One Last Chance has earned him a place on the Shooting Stars Roadshow that tours film festivals such as Berlin and Taormina, showcasing major new European acting talent. Even as he stands at the threshold of stardom, Jamie admits it was football that was his passion while growing up in Edinburgh, not acting. As trials for Motherwell and Dundee led nowhere, it was creaking past the 20-mark that eventually forced him to concede he had missed his chance. “I cried myself to sleep for a few nights when I realised it wasn’t quite happening. In hindsight, I know it didn’t work for a reason – I just wasn’t good enough.” For a while he drifted from job to job working in a paper mill, then as a postman, an aerial rigger. He also trained as an apprentice electrician, and even did a stint as an Edinburgh bouncer.
Nothing he did satisfied him, until he recalled that he had secretly enjoyed drama at school. “Like most people from certain areas, I kept it to myself. They’d start taking your dinner money if they knew you liked reading aloud.” Jamie enrolled in acting classes, then “blanket-bombed” drama colleges with applications. He went to the Drama Centre between 1995 and 1998 when he was in his late 20s. “The whole thing was happening at a time when I wanted a big change so I just went for it.” Drama Centre led to a string of TV roles, including Pyschos, Holby City and climbing drama Rockface, as well as a part in Vinny Jones’s football vehicle Mean Machine, which led to his latest films. There is certainly nothing pretentious about Sives. He has charisma to burn, but hasn’t let the success of Wilbur go to his head. “Acting doesn’t come easy to me at all.”
It may not, but Sives has been compared to a young Sean Connery and it’s not hard to imagine him following in the footsteps of Ewan McGregor and Dougray Scott.
(Extracted from the Scotsman August 2003)
Polly Walker
Polly Walker’s screen alter ego, Atia, was the most flamboyant character on television in 2005. Undoubtedly the star of the BBC and HBO's grand and wildly expensive drama “Rome”, when we first see her, in her elaborate red wig and very little else, she is having raucous sex with a tradesman in front of her long-suffering slave. Next we watch her naked in a bath, chatting to her embarrassed teenage son (the future Augustus Caesar). She goes on to immerse herself in sacrificial bull's blood and to flog her servant to work off a vile mood. It was a tour de force from Polly and earned her a Golden Globe nomination as best actress in a TV drama (the series has also been nominated but no other actor). It was also a phoenix -like career move for the 39-year-old actress who has gone from early Hollywood highs as Harrison Ford's terrorist co-star in “Patriot Games” at 23 to single motherhood, struggles with men and unemployment.
Atia, a role Polly will reprise in the second series, is the high point of a career notable for its peaks and troughs. She had a strong start; after three years at the Drama Centre London (between 1985-88) she went straight on tour with the RSC, playing the second gravedigger to Mark Rylance's Hamlet, then she got the title role in the 1990 TV adaptation of “Lorna Doone” and next came “Patriot Games”. Polly was flown to Los Angeles to audition with instructions to bring her own underwear. She found herself on stage in her bra and knickers, watched by Ford and the producer, miming shooting someone. It may have been non-PC, but she got the part.’There were lots of other glamorous girls being tested that day and I felt very ordinary and inadequate,’ she says.’ Sean Bean was auditioning, too. We realised we'd got the parts and were on the same plane on the way back, in business class, and we were so relieved we drank champagne all the way. When we landed I couldn't get my boots back on!'
Next came Enchanted April in 1992 with Joan Plowright, filmed in Tuscany where Polly met her first husband. He was an Italian businessman (she has never named him or any of her exes); they married the same year and she went to live in the medieval hilltop town of Bergamo. Polly had a son, Giorgio, in 1994; a year later the marriage broke down and Polly moved back to London. 'It was difficult and worrying. But we all have our journeys. And what's the alternative? Fall to pieces? It's so long ago now; all those feelings are kind of long buried. And, you know I can handle it. My mum Georgina helps me out massively. She steps in and holds the fort for me, and so do my two sisters.’ With her mother's help, Polly was able to keep working; she made the disappointing “Sliver” with Sharon Stone, “Restoration” with Robert Downey Jr., “Emma” with Gwyneth Paltrow (Polly played Jane Fairfax) and “The Woodlanders” with Rufus Sewell. But then she met her next serious partner and in 2000 had her second child, Delilah, again separating from the father of her child soon after the birth. She has never explained why her relationships fell apart; both men, she insists, were the 'love of her Iife' at the time. All she will say is that 'men require a lot of work and attention'. Still, as a single mother with two children, she was forced to put her career on the back burner, taking a three-year break. Polly reignited her career in 2002, appearing in the well-received TV dramas “State of Play”, “The Mayor of Casterbridge” and “Jeffrey Archer: The Truth”. She now lives in Chiswick with her children and her partner of two years, a Welsh actor.
Polly herself is one of four: her older sister Emma lives over the road in Chiswick, her little sister Hannah is a full-time mother and younger brother Danny an antique glass specialist. Her father Arthur continues to run his country house hotel in Statham, Cheshire, where her mother Georgina, a retired art teacher, also works. As a child, Polly always wanted to dance. At ten, she boarded at The Bush Davies Ballet School in East Grinstead. ‘I missed my mum massively,' she says. 'I kept a pillowcase that my mother had folded. I put it on my pillow. At night I'd open it and kiss along the creases her hand had touched!' She grins. 'But I never saw coming home as an option. 'At 16, Polly graduated to the Ballet Rambert School in Twickenham, 'but my heart wasn't in it. As soon as the teacher's back was turned I'd be the first one leaning on the barre.' She wasn't sorry when she had to stop dancing at 17 because her body, overcome by the barrage of training, began to buckle, literally, at the knees.
Polly has a powerful personality; once she has established what she wants, she acts on her decisions, and seems content with the paths she has chosen. 'I've not had much money.' she remarks.’ but it's rare to find an actor who's roiling in it. And I have quite expensive taste in shoes and handbags - I blow it all.' Her money, these days, goes on sending the children to private schools. 'I live off baked beans when I'm at home. 'Will they become actors as well? She flings up her hands passionately. 'They're not allowed to be! Banned! Banned! They're both displaying extraordinary...' She shakes her head in horror. 'I don't want that life for them!" Still, it is a life that hasn't done Polly Walker badly. Atia of the Julii, I think, would be singularly impressed.
From The Sunday Mail “You Magazine” 2006
Stephen Wight
Stephen Wight is 27 but looks younger. Especially when he’s talking, wide-eyed and grinning, about the brilliant year he’s just had. It began when writer Patrick Marber personally lobbied for Wight to play Stan, the browbeaten servant of Rhys Ifan’s wastrel in Marber’s hit play, “Don Juan in Soho”, at the Donmar Warehouse.
So successful was this casting that Marber also put Wight up for another older role, that of Mugsy, the irrepressibly naïve waiter in Sam West’s revival of Marber’s poker play, “Dealer’s Choice”. That production won rave reviews too and transferred to the West End. Wight then learned that Stan and Mugsy had won him the Outstanding Newcomer Award at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards. Previous winners include Hollywood star Jake Gyllenhall, Eve Best and Chewitel Ejiofor. Not bad for a guy who “fell into acting by accident”.
Despite playing a reckless poker player (having started to play poker himself) Stephen Wight is cautious about money. Only now, he says, has he realised the financial hardship his blue-collar family went through during his schooldays and his time at drama school. When he was six, Wight’s carpenter dad Dave and accountant mother Margaret moved him and his older brother Chris from Essex to the Isle of Wight. “It was a big gamble to get a better life, but it paid off”, says Wight. “Mum got accounting jobs for various small firms, and dad made helicopter parts for what was then Westland… As I’ve grown older, though, I’ve realised how hard it must have been for Mum and Dad at times, as it was for anyone who was semi-working class in the 1980s”, he says. “We always had food on the table, but I think they had to scrimp and save to make sure me and my brother never did without”.
Safe and secure as his home life was, his childhood was not entirely untroubled. “Life has not been a bed of roses, but it’s not been a nightmare either,” he says. “I have been largely untouched by tragedy, but everyone has demons in their past, abuses they have suffered”.
He’s small: was he bullied as a child? “I can’t say I was very severely targeted or driven to suicidal thoughts, but I was a spotty kid, not terribly successful with girls, and those things matter at that age. But I handled it alright. I concentrated on my friends, my sport and my acting”.
The sport led, indirectly, to acting. At 14 Wight pretended to audition for the school play then bunked off to play football with his mates, only to be caught by the drama teacher and forced to play a singing amphibian in a musical version of Aristophanes’ “The Frogs”. Acting was just something he did for a laugh. “I just thought, ‘Well, let’s give this a go, then’. If I hadn’t got into the Drama Centre [between 1999-2001], I’d probably still be on the Isle of Wight, working for Currys.
It was not until his second year a drama school that the acting bug really bit, and he has scarcely been out of work since. Shortly after graduating, while working as a “charity mugger”, he was cast in a seven-month RSC tour of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”.
In 2005 he played David Jason’s son in TV drama “Diamond Geezer” – “that was the financial breakthrough” – and there have been a couple of films including the Brit horror “Wilderness”, and plenty more theatre.
From The Evening Standard 23 November 2007
Penelope Wilton
Penelope Wilton was born in 1946 in Scarborough to parents from Newcastle. Hers was always a theatrical family – her maternal grandparents owned cinemas in Newcastle, her uncle Bill Travers married his Born Free co-star Virginia McKenna, and her mother Alice was a tap dancer and Panto performer until she gave it up to marry Wilton’s father Clifford. The family moved to London when she was young and throughout her childhood: “I grew up doing little plays with my sister – acting was just what I always wanted to do”. Penelope took herself off to the Drama Centre, London “as soon as I could at 18” (1965-68). After which she soon landed a stage management job in Nottingham, then the part of Cordelia in Jonathan Miller’s King Lear.
Since then she has had an incredibly varied career taking in theatre, film and TV roles. Her roles have included everything from Shakespeare, Ibsen, Pinter, the ever put-upon Ann in Ever Decreasing Circles, a woman who falls in love with a murderess in Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads, Iris from Calendar Girls to Shaun of the Dead.
It is clear in all the chosen roles that she immerses herself in characters and disappears into their lives. She erases herself and becomes the character: “The thing about being an actor is that you turn into other people. You have to hide yourself a bit in order to let that other person come out.” Howard Davies, who directed her in The House of Bernarda Alba in 2005 and David Hare’s The Secret Rapture in 1988, both at the National, says Wilton has phenomenal ability to plumb the paradoxes of a character. She can “describe peoples’ strengths and weaknesses” but she can also “see two sides of the situation” and makes her characters real and in some cases, even manages to make the audience like or at least sympathise with characters who, in actual fact, have behaved appallingly – it is this ability which has made her one of our most enduring and best loved actresses.
From The Guardian 25.10.2007