Damian Lewis
Actor, Dad, Redhead, and Ping Pong Champion
Categories Band of Brothers Keane Media Print Media Richard Winters The Forsyte Saga

Damian Lewis: Cherwell Salutes You – May 11, 2011

Damian Lewis: Cherwell Salutes You

Damian Lewis is making me a cup of tea. Dressed in Ugg boots, a checked shirt and a stylish knit cardigan, he’s every inch the metrosexual, cool guy about town: down with the kids in more ways than one, he has to head off after the interview to read his children a bedtime story.

Continue reading Damian Lewis: Cherwell Salutes You – May 11, 2011

Categories Media Print Media The Baker

Damian Lewis: Slow Cooking, The Independent, February 26, 2008

Damian Lewis: Slow Cooking

Seven years after Tom Hanks told him he’d be the first red-haired movie star, Damian Lewis is making his mark in ‘The Baker’.

 By James Rampton – The Independent – 26 February 2008

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Damian Lewis is deep in conversation with his brother Gareth, who has just directed the actor in his latest film, The Baker. So how was it for the actor working with his younger sibling? “We’ve actually had a ball working together,” Lewis declares, as Gareth bids us farewell. “Maybe at the end of each working day, the Coen brothers throw knives at pictures of each other when they get home, but Gareth and I had such fun. It was like being kids again, only more sophisticated.” He stops and grins. “Perhaps I should say, ‘only marginally more sophisticated’! We certainly have more expensive toys now.”

Continue reading Damian Lewis: Slow Cooking, The Independent, February 26, 2008

Categories Band of Brothers Media Print Media The Forsyte Saga Warriors

Interview: The Charmer, The Times / Sunday Times, November 17, 2002

The Charmer

by Lesley White, The Times / Sunday Times, November 17, 2002

Smooth, confident and raring to reinvent himself, Damian Lewis is just the chap to play Jeffrey Archer, says Lesley White

When we meet on the Pinewood set of the slapstick satire, written by Guy Jenkin, creator of Drop the Dead Donkey, Lewis’s flaming red hair is dyed brown, the make-up department has achieved a not totally streak-free job with the fake tan, and, with his funky shorts, he is transformed not into Jeffrey, but a cross between an Ibiza raver and a boy scout. As Greta Scacchi is playing Margaret Thatcher, we can assume no attempt at impersonation is being made.

In some ways, Lewis, 31, and the celebrated fantasist have more in common than it might first appear. While the latter has spent his adult life embellishing his biography for public consumption, the actor went through a period of reverse self-invention. Rather than admit having attended Eton, for example, he told early interviewers that he went to boarding school, then changed the subject before they could ask which one. “I tried to sever all ties to my posh upbringing. It made me feel as if I couldn’t be a genuine moody actor. I’m desensitised to that now.”
Continue reading Interview: The Charmer, The Times / Sunday Times, November 17, 2002

Categories Band of Brothers Dreamcatcher Interviews Media Print Media The Forsyte Saga

Guardian Interview: Shooting Star – March 10, 2002

Shooting star

by Jay Rayner | The Guardian | 

Watching Damian Lewis leading the men of Easy Company to victory in Spielberg’s WWII epic Band of Brothers, you’d never guess he went to Eton and attended drama school with Ewan MacGregor. Now, though, he is returning to more familiar territory as the iconic Soames in The Forsyte Saga.

The middle-aged Italian waitress clearly does not recognise the actor she is shouting at or, if she does, she has had enough experience at being a sour-faced waitress not to show it. This is the second time she has asked Damian Lewis to choose what he wants for lunch and it is the second time he has asked for a few more minutes. ‘Look,’ she says, with a fearsome shrug, arms spread wide. ‘We are busy. You don’t order now, then the kitchen, it become busy. You wait too long for your food. You get cross.’ There is a convincing logic here: the small, smokey cafe in London’s St James’s is indeed already crammed with people.

Continue reading Guardian Interview: Shooting Star – March 10, 2002

Categories Band of Brothers Media Print Media

Man of the Month: Damian Lewis, A Brit of the Action, GQ UK November 2001

“British women are just the best,” announces Damian Lewis, who you will soon know as Lieutenant Richard Winters from BBC2′s Band of Brothers. Moments later he ruminates about getting to grips with his first pair of fake breasts in LA. “I almost let out a yelp,” he says. “I thought, ‘These are like footballs!’”

One can forgive Lewis for obsessing over the female form. Last year he spent eight months with thousands of mud-caked grunts on the set of Tom Hanks’ and Steven Spielberg’s 70m pounds companion to Saving Private Ryan. Even his Eton College education couldn’t prepare him for the testosterone on the set of the ten-part WWII drama.

“Actors can be flaky, but the bonding was almost spiritual,” he says. Continue reading Man of the Month: Damian Lewis, A Brit of the Action, GQ UK November 2001

Categories Band of Brothers Media Print Media

Becoming an American Hero: British Actor has won Acclaim for his role in ‘Band of Brothers’, The Record, October 21, 2001

BECOMING AN AMERICAN HERO: BRITISH ACTOR HAS WON ACCLAIM FOR HIS ROLE IN `BAND OF BROTHERS’

by Virginia Rohan, The Record (Bergen County, NJ), October 21, 2001
21 October 2001
by VIRGINIA ROHAN

Every day during the filming of “Band of Brothers,” Damian Lewis diligently worked with a dialect coach because he was determined to sound like a flesh-and-blood Yank.

“My American accent, before I did ‘Band of Brothers, was kind of wishy-washy, a cross between John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart,” Lewis says in a crisp, unmistakably British voice. “I feel quite comfortable doing a straightforward American accent now. I was kind of an honorary American for last year.”

Mastering Ameri-speak is one of many impressive feats Lewis pulls off in HBO’s 10-part World War II miniseries. The London-born actor, virtually unknown in America before this role, has won critical acclaim for his poignant and convincing turn as Richard Winters, the laconic lieutenant who quickly emerged as the leader of U.S. Army’s Easy Company, 506th Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division.

Based on historian Stephen E. Ambrose’s bestseller of the same title, “Band of Brothers” follows this disparate group of men from their paratrooper training in Georgia to their amazing sweep through Northwest Europe from their harrowing jump into Normandy on D-day to their fierce, bloody fight in the Battle of the Bulge to the capture of Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest in Berchtesgaden. Continue reading Becoming an American Hero: British Actor has won Acclaim for his role in ‘Band of Brothers’, The Record, October 21, 2001

Categories Band of Brothers Media Print Media The Forsyte Saga

Damian Lewis: “I want to work with some girls!”, Now Magazine, October 17, 2001

Damian Lewis: “I want to work with some girls!”

by Jay Bowers, Now Magazine, October 17, 2001

After starring in two major war dramas, Damian’s had enough of playing soldiers

Damian Lewis is the star of Steven Spielberg’s new 85 million war drama on BBC2, but his success has been marred by the death of his mother and an illness which almost cost him his next role.

It’s been a year of extreme highs and lows for Damian Lewis. The London-born actor landed the biggest role of his life when he beat 7,000 hopefuls for the part of hero Major Richard Winters in Steven Spielberg’s epic war drama Band Of Brothers. But just months after filming finished, his 63-year-old mother Charlotte died in a car crash while on holiday in India. Continue reading Damian Lewis: “I want to work with some girls!”, Now Magazine, October 17, 2001

Categories Band of Brothers Interviews Media Personal and Family Life Print Media The Forsyte Saga Theatre

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

Categories Band of Brothers Media Print Media The Forsyte Saga

A minute with… Damian Lewis, Woman’s Own, October 8, 2001

A minute with … Damian Lewis

by Tim Oglethorpe, Woman’s Own, October 8, 2001

A former Eton schoolboy, British-born Damian is set for international stardom for his role as American war hero, Dick Winters, in Steven Spielberg’s 10-part 65 million TV series Band of Brothers. He’s currently filming an adaption of the 1960’s television hit The Forsyte Saga

Tell us about Band of Brothers.
My character, American Dick Winters, is a leader of a crack paratrooper unit which paved the way for the Allied advance across Europe during the Second World War.

How tough was the preparation for it?
They treated us, as much as possible, like real soldiers. We spent 10 days in boot camp in Aldershot. It was tough -getting up at 6am, doing 80 press-ups, going for a run, taking a cold shower and then continuing the day in much the same way. But I think it was necessary to do. It created a bond among the actors playing the soldiers and it also made us physically fitter. Continue reading A minute with… Damian Lewis, Woman’s Own, October 8, 2001

Categories Band of Brothers Media Print Media

Places to go… People to meet, Daily Telegraph, October 5, 2001

Places to go… people to meet

by Emily Bearn, Daily Telegraph, October 5, 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.

Continue reading Places to go… People to meet, Daily Telegraph, October 5, 2001

Categories Band of Brothers Media Print Media

Command Performance, The Sunday Times, September 30, 2001

Command performance

by Jeff Dawson, The Sunday Times, September 30, 2001

Jeff Dawson meets Damian Lewis, the British star of Spielberg’s Band of Brothers, the most costly TV series ever.

Tony To, the executive producer of Band of Brothers, reckons Damian Lewis is like “a young Steve McQueen”. At the very least, the actor turns up to our interview on a motorbike. “I love it when they talk like that,” he laughs, wrestling off his waterproofs in a north London Thai restaurant. “I mean, Steve McQueen’s the epitome of cool, isn’t he? Raced his car, shagged women…”

Aged 29, posh (his words), blokey, but ultra-confident in that public-school way, these are strange days for Damian Lewis. In one breath, he will refer to the house he shares with his brother in London’s unglamorous Kensal Green. In the next, he’ll mention his new chums “Tom” and “Steven”, tossing off their names as if they were a pair of drinking muckers rather than Messrs Hanks and Spielberg. It’s under their patronage that he has suddenly found himself paraded around Hollywood as the Next Big Thing. Continue reading Command Performance, The Sunday Times, September 30, 2001

Categories Band of Brothers Media Print Media

Everyone’s talking about…, The Observer, September 30, 2001

Everyone’s talking about…

by Duncan Turner, The Observer, September 30, 2001

Damian Lewis in Band of Brothers

When Steven Spielberg decided to produce a mini-series based on the real-life heroics of US infantrymen in World War II, getting into the cast was the hottest ticket in town. To much surprise, Old Etonian and RSC graduate Damian Lewis emerged with the leading role.

Band of Brothers tells the story of a company of US paratroopers who landed in Normandy in 1944 and fought their way across Europe, ending up at Hitler’s mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden in the spring of 1945. Lewis plays the company’s commanding officer, Major Richard Winters, and his performance led the New York Times to praise his ‘big Burt Lancaster eyes and grave face’ that allow him ‘to evoke Winters’s humanity and accessibility, as well as the mystery and reserve that emanate from all good leaders’. His Pennsylvanian accent is impeccable and his speech and gesture have the terse economy of the battle-hardened soldier.

Continue reading Everyone’s talking about…, The Observer, September 30, 2001