posh – Damian Lewis

The Five New Varieties of Posh

On August 28, 2022August 28, 2022 By Gingersnap Comments Off

Outsider Posh

by Shane Watson | The Telegraph | August 28, 2022

You probably saw the hoo-ha about Victoria Beckham giving an online make-up class while sounding a lot like the Queen. Just kidding. Only the Queen sounds like the Queen. But there’s no doubt that Posh is putting on the posh in this video, as well as the transatlantic and the fashion “mwah mwah darling”.

Anyway, the video has caused some amusement because, while we have come a long way from Nancy Mitford’s U and non-U ratings, and the old-school posh are no longer the object of drooling curiosity (now we’re far more interested in Harry Styles and Alex Scott), class, these days, is an ever-shifting, fast-evolving thing, and it’s still pretty entertaining.

If you’re remotely interested in where you stand on the chart of posh, here are some clues. PS: we’re not including Genuine Poshos (GPs) like Camilla Parker Bowles, because they won’t be interested in their chart position, since they have no doubt of it… that being one of the defining qualities of the GPs.

NEW SUPER POSH (NSP)
How you spot them: Still dress their children as characters from AA Milne books
The poster couple for NSP are William and Kate who are redefining old-school GP (Camilla and Charles) and giving us so much new material in the process. They are downsizing to a “cottage” in Windsor (NSPs are not interested in flunkies lining the walls of dining rooms, and consider all that stuff to be very faux Downtown). They’re getting rid of the nanny (far more hands-on in the childcare department). They’re more at ease with PDAs (see William squeezy hugging at the Women’s Euro Final) and Kate has made lashings of make-up and white teeth less of a no-no. This category is evolving so fast we can barely keep up.

Continue reading The Five New Varieties of Posh

Red Hot: The Irresistible Rise of Damian Lewis – Sept 8, 2006

On September 8, 2006July 6, 2020 By Damianista Comments Off

Damian Lewis: The Chameleon Performer

by Liz Hoggard | The Independent | September 8, 2006

Damian Lewis is an intense chap, capable of conveying a huge range of emotions with the smallest gesture. He’s hotly tipped for an Oscar for his new film. And he’s a real gent. Just don’t call him posh, whatever you do.

“Ask him about that intense thing he does with his eyes,” a female journalist suggested when she heard I was interviewing the actor Damian Lewis. What’s striking about Lewis is how much he manages to convey by doing so very little. There is stillness about him on screen, a faraway look that can evoke anger or desire or – if you saw his rollicking performance as Benedict in BBC1’s modern-day version of Much Ado about Nothing – sheer hilarity.

The press love to brand Lewis as an arrogant posh boy. Like David Cameron, he went to Eton. But, among his generation of actors, no one does grief and repressed emotion so well. In Spielberg’s Second World War epic, Band of Brothers, he played an American soldier facing up to fear with a quiet certainty (it won him a Golden Globe nomination). He was the bewildered newlywed who doesn’t understand why his marriage is falling apart in Hearts and Bones. And in the remake of The Forsyte Saga, he did the unthinkable – making the brutal Soames sympathetic.

For several years now, 35-year-old Lewis has been a successful actor on the verge of becoming a major star. Unlike Ewan McGregor or Joseph Fiennes, his contemporaries at London’s Guildhall drama school, you might still walk past him in the street. But all that should change with the release of his new film Keane: his performance is already sparking Oscar rumours in the States.

Continue reading Red Hot: The Irresistible Rise of Damian Lewis – Sept 8, 2006

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

On November 17, 2002October 8, 2017 By Damianista Comments Off

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

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Damian Lewis Interview, Sunday Telegraph – Sept 30, 2001

On September 30, 2001January 25, 2020 By Damianista Comments Off

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.”

Continue reading Damian Lewis Interview, Sunday Telegraph – Sept 30, 2001