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Written By DamianistaComments Off on An Officer and A Gentleman – Oct 15, 2001
Eton-Educated British Actor Damian Lewis Overcame a Near-Fatal Motorcycle Crash and a Family Tragedy on His Way to the Spotlight
by Russell Scott Smith | US Weekly | October 15, 2001
IT WAS A COLD WINTERS NIGHT IN London when Damian Lewis crashed, face-first through a car’s windshield and almost died. That evening, in 1998, the actor had been buzzing along the chilly, dark streets on his Honda VFR750 motorcycle, heading home from the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Barbican Theatre, where he was playing Don John the Bastard in Much Ado About Nothing. Suddenly, a car veered into Lewis’s path. His bike rammed the car’s front bumper, and he flew over the handlebars; Lewis broke the car’s windshield with his chin. “Thank God I had a full-face helmet on,” the 30-year old actor says. “If I hadn’t, I’m not sure I’d be here now. Or at least my acting career would be very different.” Continue reading An Officer and A Gentleman – Oct 15, 2001
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Written By DamianistaComments Off on Damian Lewis Interview, Sunday Telegraph – Sept 30, 2001
Bananas and Marmalade
by Emily Bearn | Sunday Telegraph | September 30, 2001
Damian Lewis is an Old Etonian who plays an American war hero in Spielberg’s latest epic, and dreams of being the next James Bond. Emily Bearn meets the young contender.
Damian Lewis (if the actor’s publicists in London, New York and Los Angeles are to be believed) is destined to be pretty big — he is already big enough to turn up for our interview two hours late. We have arranged to meet at the Midland Hotel in Manchester, which has been Lewis’s home for the past six months while he has been filming a new adaptation of Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga for ITV. Journalists and photographers are milling around the hotel’s palm-fronded foyer, being sporadically debriefed as to Lewis’s whereabouts by Michael, a member of his publicity team, who is directing operations from a mobile telephone. We are plied with complimentary croissants and told that the delay is attributable to Lewis’s intense filming commitments, coupled with a recent unscheduled appearance at the Manchester Royal Infirmary, where he had his appendix whipped out.
When he eventually arrives, Lewis looks calm, robust and fairly confident of the fact that he is one of the swifter-ascending stars of the small screen. He is dressed in jeans and a slightly grubby grey shirt; his orange hair is damp or fashionably slicked, and his freckles suggest he has been in the sun. He is 30, but has the sort of pleasant, negotiable looks that mean he could pass himself off as a decade older or younger. After Lewis has dispatched Michael into the Manchester drizzle to buy him bananas, we retire to a suite in which the bed has been replaced by a table bearing yet more croissants. Lewis eats two, with the rapacity of a man who has missed breakfast, pausing between bites to explain the etymology of marmalade.
We are here to discuss Band of Brothers, an American Second World War drama in which Lewis plays Major Dick Winters, the hero who led an élite US Army corps as it parachuted into France on D-Day. The ten-part series (which swallowed a budget of about £86 million and will be screened by the BBC this week) was produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks and has been attacked for — as one British tabloid put it — casting an “unashamedly American slant on the Second World War.”
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Written By DamianistaComments Off on This American Platoon is Led by a Brit, Los Angeles Times, August 20, 2000
Damian Lewis survived a slew of tests to win the role of a war hero.
by DAVID GRITTEN, Los Angeles Times, August 20, 2000
HATFIELD, England — “I’ve really screwed up my hearing,” grimaces Damian Lewis. “I should have had earplugs in.”
The mud-spattered Lewis, in a World War II paratrooper uniform, has spent the morning shooting blanks (24 for each take) from an M-1 rifle at a crowd of extras dressed as German soldiers.
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Written By DamianistaComments Off on Watch Out for The Young Dudes, Evening Standard, July 8, 2000
Young, gifted and British: the new crop of Brit actors seems to have been cast in the mould marked “Good-Looking — But In An Unconventional Manner”. And there is nothing the film industry likes more than faces that stick in the mind long after they’ve smiled or scowled their way across a screen. Continue reading Watch Out for The Young Dudes, Evening Standard, July 8, 2000
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Written By GingersnapComments Off on Fighting Talk, New Woman – October, 1999
Love Wars
by Staff | New Woman | October, 1999
Ioan Gruffudd and Damian Lewis play soldiers in a new BBC drama, so we thought we’d check out their basic training in the love wars.
We love a man in uniform, and they don’t come much better-looking than Ioan Gruffudd, 25, and Damian Lewis, 27. They’re officers in “Warriors”, BBC’s new hard-hitting series about Bosnia. But if they were really in the army, would they lead the charge or get beaten up in the showers?
Right, you ‘orrible men, we’re taking you over the NW emotional assault course to see what you’re made of…
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Written By GingersnapComments Off on Hamlet: Swordplay the Serious Way, New York Times, July 2, 1995
Hamlet: Swordplay the Serious Way
By Matt Wolf, theater critic and journalist in London, New York Times, July 2, 1995
LONDON— “A HIT, A VERY PALPABLE HIT!” cries the courtier Osric during the climactic duel of “Hamlet.” And in the Broadway production now at the Belasco Theater, those hits are palpable indeed.
Productions of “Hamlet” are often distinguished by verse speaking or physical design. Jonathan Kent’s current staging, imported from the Almeida Theater Company in London, offers an additional virtue in the face-off between Hamlet (played by Ralph Fiennes) and Laertes (Damian Lewis). Beginning on a white rectangular fencing mat, the fight soon spills beyond it, weaving among the chairs of Claudius’s dismayed court as the two combatants become increasingly fevered.
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Written By GingersnapComments Off on Great British Hopes: Damian Lewis – Feb 11, 1995
Great British Hopes: Damian Lewis
by Kate Bassett – The Times – 11 February 1995
Damian Lewis
Profession: Actor
Age: 23
Claim to fame: The New York Times hailed him as “The new Ralph Fiennes? The next Hugh Grant?”
Distinctive features: Six foot three. Flaming red hair. “I wasn’t aware of my hair until critics started talking about it as part of the performance,” says Lewis good-humouredly. “Maybe there’s a whole play going on on top of my head.”
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Written By GingersnapComments Off on Who Will Be The New Ralph Fiennes, The Next Hugh Grant? – Jan 1, 1995
Who Will Be The New Ralph Fiennes, The Next Hugh Grant?
By Matt Wolf – New York Times – January 1, 1995
LONDON— NOT LONG AGO, DANIEL Day Lewis and Kenneth Branagh were the British names on everyone’s lips when it came to actors; more recently, Hugh Grant and Ralph Fiennes have dominated Hollywood’s imagination. Which raises the inevitable question: Who among current British actors are poised to become the next Hugh Grant and the next Ralph Fiennes?
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Written By GingersnapComments Off on Hamlet in the Park – June 17, 1994
Hamlet in the Park – Theatre
by Alastair Macaulay – Financial Times – June 17, 1994
This most excellent canopy the air, look you . . . It makes a difference to when you can see the firmament Hamlet is talking about, and here is one of the gains of watching Hamlet in the Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park. With the sky above he counts himself king of infinite space; amid the theatre he might be bounded in a nutshell. Continue reading Hamlet in the Park – June 17, 1994
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Written By GingersnapComments Off on Prince Who’s Fit For a King: Paul Taylor Reviews Hamlet at the Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park – June 15, 1994
Prince who’s fit for a king: Paul Taylor reviews Hamlet at the Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park
There are some actors who approach the role of Hamlet via a rigorous apprenticeship in parts that have more than a smack of the Prince of Denmark: Konstantin in The Seagull, say, or Oswald in Ghosts. One such is Simon Russell Beale who is to play Hamlet, at long last, for Sam Mendes. At the opposite extreme are those actors who find themselves pitched in at the deep end early in their careers and prove that they can swim with precocious bravura.
At the Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park, there is now an egregious example of this latter type in Damian Lewis, who tackles the role in Tim Piggott-Smith’s otherwise patchy production. Lewis has all the stage presence and captivating instincts of a Michael Sheen. Long-limbed, in a black bum-freezer jacket, he reminds you a little of a Dickensian hero.
