James McAvoy Biography

In his mid-teens, James would briefly consider becoming a journalist. His religious upbringing brought thoughts of becoming a priest or, better still as it would take him out into the world beyond Glasgow, a missionary. A band might also offer an escape route. Proficient on bass, guitar and drums, he'd join an outfit that was forever changing its name, at one point pilfering the moniker of Scottish folk rockers Shooglenifty. Confident in their superior musical knowledge, they were convinced no one would've heard of the originals but, of course, everyone had. Still, they remained cocky, strutting around in their waistcoats and cowboy boots, wearing spectacles they didn't need.

But it wasn't to be music that drew McAvoy into a career, rather a chance encounter with a film-maker. Actor and director David Hayman lived next door to the boy's English teacher and was asked, when McAvoy was 16, to come in and address the class. The encounter did not go well, the majority of the boys scoffing at Hayman's artistic pretensions, even calling him a poof. With his musical background, though, young James did not naturally equate art with homosexuality, and spied an opportunity. Approaching Hayman afterwards, he buttered the director up a little, expressed his enthusiasm for his efforts and, crucially, asked if Hayman could possibly involve him in his next project, whatever it was, as a tea boy, as anything.

Propitiously, Hayman was actually in the throes of putting together his next directorial project, The Near Room, a dark thriller where journalist Adrian Dunbar must track down his adopted daughter before she's killed by a paedophile gang (Andy Serkis would play a transvestite). Keen to cast in minor roles youngsters with no acting experience, Hayman would recall the passionate young student and, four months after his disastrous talk, would offer the boy a role. It was only small, but it was a start.

McAvoy's seventeenth year was good in many respects. Having been so strict for so long, his grandparents would now suddenly grant him freedoms he'd never enjoyed before. Respecting and trusting him, they allowed him to do pretty much as he pleased, expecting him to take responsibility for his own actions. And this he would do, eschewing a deadening life on the dole for two years of early morning toil in the bakeries of Sainsbury's supermarket. Training as a confectioner, he'd fill buns with cream and jam and put the finishing touches to cakes. More importantly, he'd make a brave and idiosyncratic choice of career. Though offered a place in the faculty of Social Science at Glasgow University and a chance to read English and Politics at Strathclyde, McAvoy had also applied to the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. He was not burning to be an actor, he'd later explain, indeed had the Royal Academy turned him down he'd have given up acting as not being for him. But they did accept him, and it was for him.

By the time McAvoy was settling in to his first year he had a second major credit on his CV. This was 1997's Regeneration, based on Pat Barker's bestselling novel and directed by Gillies Mackinnon, who the year before had enjoyed cult success with the wonderful Small Faces. Set in 1917 Scotland at Edinburgh's Craiglockhart Hospital, this would follow the friendship of poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, both being treated for shellshock during WWI. Jonathan Pryce would play a psychiatrist tormented by his job - if he helps his patients back to sanity they'll be sent back to the front or, worse in Sassoon's case, executed for treason. For such a fraught home-based drama, Mackinnon would draw together a wealth of Scottish talent, including Jonny Lee Miller, Dougray Scott, Kevin McKidd and McAvoy's mentor David Hayman. And, in a second minor role, McAvoy himself.

McAvoy's screen work would be limited for the next three years. He'd win a bit part in An Angel Passes By, a 24-minute short for ITV's New Voices season, where a grieving widower would take his two kids on holiday (the piece would be a winner at the San Francisco Film Festival), and a small role in cop series The Bill. Aside from this, it was all about technique, and about theatre. A naturally gifted mimic, he'd excel at accents and also, with his sporting background, at fencing and gymnastics. Quickly he rose to prominence in the college's drama productions. Having appeared in Portia Coughlan (as Fintan Goolan) and The Cherry Orchard, he'd be chosen to play the lead of Orestes in The Oresteian Trilogy, moving on to Measure For Measure (as Claudio) and The Beaux Stratagem.

Staying true to his grandparents' belief in hard work, McAvoy would also build his experience by taking stage work outside of college. He'd play Ferdinand in Mhari Gilbert's production of The Tempest for The Brunton Theatre, a 300-seater in Musselburgh, 20 minutes from the centre of Edinburgh. He'd travel down to the recently opened Courtyard Theatre in Hereford, to play Romeo and Riff in Jonathan Stone's adaptations of Romeo And Juliet and West Side Story, then stick with Stone when the director put on his traditional pantomime in collaboration with Sheila Thomson at the Adam Smith Theatre, Kirkcaldy. This would be a rollicking, inventive version of Beauty And The Beast, with McAvoy appearing as Bobby Buckfast.

McAvoy's final two plays in Scotland would both be controversial productions. At Edinburgh's Lyceum he'd star in Kenny Ireland's adaptation of Brian Friel's Lovers, set in Northern Ireland, where he'd play Joe, a 17-year-old just finishing school, with a pregnant girlfriend and big hopes, all of them doomed. Also in Edinburgh, at the Traverse in 2000, he'd appear in Jeanne-Mance Delisle's The Reel Of The Hanged Man. Based on people Delisle had known growing up in North Quebec, this would see a family attempting to survive grinding poverty while the drunken, violent, feckless father conducts an incestuous relationship with his oldest daughter. The play, which saw the family (McAvoy playing teenage son Gerald) escaping into music and anarchic displays of freedom, had shocked the Catholic community years before and still stirred up trouble now. As it was being put on by Muriel Romanes and the Stellar Quines Company, a group dedicated to highlighting women's issues, its subject matter was distasteful to many company members, including founding director and BAFTA-winning actress Gerda Stevenson, who resigned in protest.

Graduating from the Royal Academy that same year (earlier alumni had included Bill Paterson, Alan Cumming, David Tennant and Billy Boyd), McAvoy decided to try his luck in London, moving to the poor but trendy East End. Soon joining him in his adventure would be long-time girlfriend Emma Neilson, a young Scottish actress he'd met in Edinburgh. A member of the Lyceum's Youth Theatre, Neilson would spend Christmas 2000 as a kitchen maid in that theatre's production of Cinderella, then follow McAvoy down to London when she enrolled at the Central School of Speech and Drama. Here she'd have to take the name of Emma King, Equity already having a member named Emma Neilson (actually a relative of former boxing champion Eddie Neilson.

In the meantime, McAvoy's career was quickly taking off. On TV he'd appear in a new adaptation of Lorna Doone, with Amelia Warner as the titular heroine. As Sergeant Bloxham, he'd be given the job of protecting John Ridd's family from the evil Doone clan, being helped in his reports by pretty Lizzie Ridd. He'd also win an important role in an episode of the BBC crime series Murder In Mind, created by Anthony Horowitz (later to hit big with Stormbreaker), the series' twist being that the action was viewed through the eyes of the supposed killer, McAvoy's episode would see David Suchet as the respectable headmaster of a posh boys' school who, profoundly confused by secret desires, one night appproaches rent boy McAvoy for sex. Quickly realising his error, Suchet tries to, ahem, back out of the situation, but McAvoy pulls a knife and, in the ensuing struggle, is killed. Suchet legs it, but someone's seen it all. Bring on the blackmail.

Though Lorna Doone and Murder In Mind were great experience for the young actor, they weren't unusual in their scale or prestige. This could not be said of Band Of Brothers, the WW2 miniseries produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg after the success of Saving Private Ryan. This would follow Easy Company of the 101st Airborne Corps through their training in Georgia, on to England and then, via the Normandy beaches, through France and Holland and on into the heart of Germany. With Hanks heavily involved in casting, a fine crew of young Brit actors would be involved, including Damian Lewis, Marc Warren and Simon Pegg. Hanks would clearly be impressed by young McAvoy's efforts, soon handpicking him to star in another of his productions.

Aside from Murder In Mind and Band Of Brothers, McAvoy's only other screen appearance of 2001 would be in the straight-to-DVD slasher flick The Pool. Filmed in Prague and featuring the up-and-coming likes of Isla Fisher and Kristen Miller, this would concern a group of good-looking kids at an international high school who, having broken into an indoor water park to celebrate graduation, get slaughtered one by one, often in an eye-poppingly inventive way. McAvoy would play Mike, former boyfriend of the bitter, bitchy Fisher, and would meet his end at the wrong end of a machete.

Having failed to win a part in Danny Boyle's apocalyptic sci-fi thriller 28 Days Later, McAvoy would spend quite a chunk of 2001 continuing his theatrical education. During March and April he'd appear in Jonathan Harvey's Out In The Open, directed by Kathy Burke at the Hampstead Theatre. Exploring the meaning of love and the limits of friendship, this would see Mark Bonnar as a gay man recovering from the death of his long-term lover. Now it seems he's ready to live again, even bringing a young Mancunian named Iggy (McAvoy) back from the pub. However, there are still secrets to be revealed about his deceased partner's adulterous tendencies. Following this, between December, 2001 and March the next year, there'd be a revival of Peter Nichols' Privates On Parade at the Donmar Warehouse. This would acquaint McAvoy with a small part of his grandfather's military experience, being set in Malaya, 1948. Here'd he'd play Private Steven Flowers, the viewpoint character, a young naif thrust into a Song And Dance Unit led by Roger Allam's larger-than-life queen Captain Terri Dennis. As the play combined exciting war action with a contemplation of the end of empire, he'd lose his virginity, then his heart to a beautiful half-caste, becoming less and less likeable as his innocence departed. It was a tough part and, despite slipping during a dance routine on press night, McAvoy would carry it off, much to the satisfaction of the Donmar's artistic director Sam Mendes, who'd later combine with Tom Hanks to give McAvoy a meaty starring role.

2002 would bring a fresh slew of McAvoy releases. First there'd be another TV appearance in Payment In Blood, based on Elizabeth George's second Inspector Lynley mystery. Here a group of renowned actors and producers are rehearsing a new play at a remote Scottish mansion when the playwright is murdered. Lynley immediately suspects the fellow now seeing his ex-girlfriend, but the real answer lies in the true parentage of young James, son of the local innkeeper, who's getting it on with the producer's neurotic daughter. And matters become yet more complicated when McAvoy is, for the second release in a row, horribly killed, this time in a boiler room.

More prestigious would be Julian Jarrold's Channel 4 adaptation of Zadie Smith's bestselling novel White Teeth, featuring Phil Davis, Geraldine James and John Simm. This would follow the fortunes of three families from the Sixties to the Nineties, juxtaposing the radically different experiences of whites, Asians and West Indians in London's Willesden Green. Here McAvoy would play the dope-smoking son of an intellectual family - his mother being a famous gardener and his dad a controversial geneticist - who gets involved with an anti-vivisection organisation, not realising that one of their main targets is his own father.

Following this would come a return to high-quality cop shows when he popped up in the very first episode of Foyle's War, created by Anthony Horowitz (earlier the man behind Murder In Mind). Set in 1940, this would see Michael Kitchen as the titular sleuth, keen to fight in the war but forced instead to solve crimes in Hastings, his plucky driver being played by Honeysuckle Weeks - both actors, coincidentally, having appeared alongside McAvoy in Lorna Doone. With a strong cast featuring Edward Fox, Robert Hardy and Rosamund Pike, the show would see Foyle hunting the killer of the local magistrate's German wife and uncovering a plot to stop the conscription of a wealthy family's son. McAvoy, meanwhile, would play an honest young greengrocer in love with a barmaid and distraught when she's killed in an air-raid.

McAvoy's final release of 2002 would be Bollywood Queen, a second exploration of contemporary British Asian culture. Unlike White Teeth, though, this one would tip its hat to both Bollywood and Grease, featuring big production numbers where songs and dance sequences mixed Motown and rock with Hindi styles in tremendously colourful fashion. The story itself would be a take on Romeo And Juliet, with young East End Asian Preeya Kalidas being saved from a falling construction beam by James, a West Country lad new to London. Romance blossoms, with complications inevitably arising from both cultural differences and the rivalry between the rag trade businesses of the couple's families. Economics, education, sex and religion would all be covered, with extra spice being added by McAvoy's loser dad, Ian McShane. And McAvoy, at last able to bring his theatrical song-and-dance experience to the screen, excelled.

Now with an American agent, and with an increasingly impressive CV on his side, McAvoy would find himself suddenly rising through the ranks. Proof of his new status would come in 2003 with a starring role in the US miniseries Children Of Dune, based on the second and third books in Frank Herbert's classic sci-fi series. Here the hero Paul Atreides has seen war break out across the universe and disappears into the desert, leaving his twin kids - McAvoy and Jessica Brooks - to rule the empire. Brooks, though, hits the Spice too heavily and becomes power-crazed, starting a civil war. McAvoy, meanwhile, escaping an assassination attempt, also travels into the desert, seeking the Golden Path his father never dared take. With some serious CGI, this would involve McAvoy melding with a giant sandworm, evolving beyond human form into a new superbeing. McAvoy did well to make this transformation credible, and to avoid being blown off the screen by such notables as Susan Sarandon, Alice Krige and Steven Berkoff.

Very different would be McAvoy's next literary outing, Stephen Fry's adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies, written for the screen as Bright Young Things. This would concern the 1930s world of London flappers, with poor writer Stephen Campbell Moore seeking the money necessary to hold on to flighty posh totty Emily Mortimer as she flits from party to party. Even though he would face stiff competition from the likes of Jim Braodbent, Richard E Grant, Dan Aykroyd and Stockard Channing, McAvoy would dominate the first part of the film, playing Lord Simon Balcairn, an aristocrat fallen on hard times and secretly earning pin money as Mr Chatterbox, a notorious gossip columnist. Desperate to remain on the party A-list, he's slowly driven to hysteria and finally dumped by his rich buddies, ending up with his head in an oven.

Next would come the superior TV drama State Of Play, written by Paul Abbott. Here rising MP David Morrissey would be engaged in an affair with his researcher, only for her to wind up under a train. When a low-level crook is also killed, a connection is made between the deaths, the newspapers become involved and a huge political conspiracy is gradually revealed. It was tough stuff, brilliantly written, and featured a strong cast including McAvoy's former co-stars Geraldine James, John Simm and Marc Warren. McAvoy himself would play an arrogant, scandal-seeking hack, the impudent son of editor Bill Nighy, and the pair would make the most of this multi-layered relationship.

2003 would end with McAvoy's first entry into out-and-out comedy. This came with the TV series Early Doors, written by and starring Craig Cash, Caroline Aherne's partner in The Royle Family. Set entirely in a pub, the series would follow the successes, tragedies and casual banter of the clientele, concentrating especially on landlord John Henshaw, whose wife has recently left him. McAvoy would appear as the boyfriend of Henshaw's step-daughter (played by Christine Bottomley), suffering the endless advice of Cash and his pals. A bit dim, he'd be blessed with a monster down below. He'd also be Scottish - one of the very few times McAvoy has been able to employ his ordinary speaking voice onscreen.

Amazingly, McAvoy had not been out of work since he left drama school. Yet more amazingly, he was consistently finding meaty parts in interesting productions. And not one of them was more intriguing than Anders Ronnow Klarlund's Strings. This was a puppet fantasy where the characters were "real" puppets, their strings being life-giving umbilical cords stretching up into the sky. When the head-string is cut the puppet dies, really dies. Thus Klarlund was able to produce a piece that not only looked fantastic but was also imbued with genuine emotion - McAvoy lending his voice to a young prince out to avenge the death of his regal father, but being tricked and marked for death by an evil vizier. Though little-seen, it was an outstanding production.

After Strings would come the far higher budget Wimbledon, where Paul Bettany would play an aging tennis pro reinvigorated by an affair with up-and-coming star Kirsten Dunst. Bernard Hill and Eleanor Bron would be Bettany's rich, eccentric parents, with McAvoy as his younger brother, a lazy smartarse in cycling spandex, constantly betting on Bettany losing. Far more serious in tone and intent would be Inside I'm Dancing where, alongside Brenda Fricker and Romola Garai, he'd play the angry, arrogant Rory O'Shea, a Dublin punk with muscular dystrophy arriving at a home for the disabled. Though he can move only two fingers it's enough, he says "for self-propulsion and self-abuse" and he proceeds to lead Steven Robertson, here a kid with cerebral palsy, in a campaign to break out and find an independent life, much like Jack Nicholson's McMurphy did in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. It was a brave role to take for a young actor, and made more complicated by the fact that the Cork accent McAvoy was using at the start of production was deemed too thick and had to be replaced with a Dublin one.

Next would come a return to TV with Shameless, written by Paul Abbott, who'd earlier authored State Of Play. This was a series dealing with the tough life of the Gallagher family on a rough Manchester estate, where the dad (David Threlfall), unemployed and addicted to gambling, is continuously drunk or drugged, leaving eldest daughter Anne-Marie Duff to act as surrogate mum to the younger kids. On first receiving their scripts, most of the actors believed the show to be a gritty urban drama. When it came to filming, though, they realised that it was actually a gritty urban comedy. Thus one of Duff's very first scenes saw her rolling around the kitchen floor, engaged in torrid sex with McAvoy, a middle-class Londoner who'd rather be a streetwise flyboy and thus has abandoned his privileged background to become a car thief.

Brilliantly written and performed, Shameless would quickly find a loyal following and McAvoy, despite leaving after the first series, would become a far more recognisable face. More importantly, though, the show would bring him back on track. As said, he'd been working constantly since leaving drama school but had lost what feeling he'd had for the work. He claims he'd never been that ambitious and, indeed, would happily have dumped acting if refused entry to the Royal Scottish Academy. Now, though, plagued by suspicions that acting was a superficial pursuit, that he was wasting his life, that he wasn't that good anyway, that this exciting career would disappear as suddenly as it arrived, he was confused and on a slippery slope downwards. Filming Shameless in Manchester, he sat in his little flat, drinking heavily, gorging on junk food, finding no solace in his relationship with Emma Neilson. He had begun to disrespect his job, to make it unimportant in his own mind so he would not be hurt when, as he feared, his acting life would end. He was falling apart.

However, help was on hand from the woman he'd enthusiastically shagged on that kitchen floor. Anne-Marie Duff was a London-born Irish actress, over eight years McAvoy's senior. Having attended London's Drama Centre with James's former co-stars Paul Bettany and John Simm, she'd gone on to play Cordelia to Ian Holm's Lear at the National Theatre and stood out in Peter Mullan's much-lauded The Magdalene Sisters. Well known for throwing herself into her parts, she was just the right person to teach McAvoy the importance of his role - both in Shameless and in life - and their relationship inevitably blossomed. Briefly, due to the success of Shameless, they'd be tabloid darlings, the latest hot screen couple. But they'd thankfully not court publicity, instead quietly going about their screen and theatre work. Thus it was hardly reported when, in October, 2006, they married.

McAvoy's Duff-given confidence would reap rewards in Inside I'm Dancing (filmed after Shameless) and would carry him back to the stage. Between February and March, 2005, he'd appear in Laura Wade's Breathing Corpses, with Niamh Cusack and Tamzin Outhwaite upstairs at the Royal Court. Here, in three converging storylines, the discovery of a dead body would change the lives of the protagonists. McAvoy would play the mild Ben, caught in a sadomasochistic relationship with Outhwaite's selfish, driven businesswoman. For Outhwaite the discovered death would take her away from work, adding to her frustration and she'd lash out at McAvoy, verbally and physically. It was a harsh drama, but very human, and its short run would be a sell-out.

Back onscreen, McAvoy's first appearance of 2005 would come in Macbeth, part of a series of BBC updates of Shakespeare. Here, with three bin-men acting as the prophetic witches, he'd take the title role, playing a top chef whose work has seen his restaurant awarded three Michelin stars. The joint's owner, however, is planning to hand the restaurant over to his son so McAvoy, egged on by his scheming wife Keeley Hawes, resorts to murder to take what he believes is rightfully his. Equally devious but far less violent would be Mr Tumnus, his character in The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, the first release from the Chronicles Of Narnia franchise. With his goaty legs entirely CGI-created, here McAvoy would play the seemingly decent faun who first encounters Lucy Pevensey on her entry to Narnia and plots to hand her over to the witch-queen Jadis. The betrayal is too much for him, though, and he lets her escape, choosing instead to himself be turned to stone in the great hall of Cair Paravel.

As Tumnus, our first contact in this strange new world, McAvoy carried a great responsibility. His efforts, combined with those in his previous roles, would see him named as Rising Star of 2006 at the BAFTA awards (an event that would see his father attempting, vainly, to re-enter his life). Immediately, he would further justify this honour with his strongest performance yet, in Kevin Macdonald's The Last King Of Scotland. Based on Giles Foden's novel, this would see McAvoy as Nicholas Garrigan, a cocky doctor seeking adventure in Uganda in 1971. After carrying on with Gillian Anderson, wife of the local British medic, he comes across a car accident and bandages the hand of a new firebrand politician. Of course this is Idi Amin, played brilliantly by Forest Whitaker, and he rewards McAvoy with a job, a flat, a flash car and a steady stream of women, buying his loyalty. But McAvoy is outspoken, daring to challenge the dictator as he becomes ever more brutal in his methods, the story moving remorselessly towards the chaos of the Entebbe hijacking, Amin losing his sanity and McAvoy's danger-fraught escape attempt. The film was a critical triumph, with many predicting Oscar nominations for both Whitaker and McAvoy.

McAvoy had already proven his willingness to take on unusual projects, and another of these was Penelope. Made by Reese Witherspoon's Type A Productions, this was a Tim Burtonesque fantasy where Christina Ricci played a young aristocrat born with a pig's snout for a nose. Hidden away from the world, she horrifies potential suitors and is cursed to stay in the darkness and marry one of her own kind. McAvoy would play a charming but dissolute rich boy, hired to woo Ricci but ending up falling for her, while Ricci herself desperately attempts to break out into the real world. A comic fairy-tale romance, it would be a true cult success.

Following Penelope and The Last King Of Scotland, McAvoy's third release of 2006 would be Starter For Ten, produced by Tom Hanks and Sam Mendes, whom he'd respectively impressed with Band Of Brothers and Privates On Parade. Set in 1985, this would see him as an Essex boy who's made it to Bristol University, getting grief from his mates for being posh and from the college nobs for being working-class. While attempting to score a place on the college's team competing in the TV quiz show University Challenge, he gets involved with one girl deeply into politics and another who's both rich and brainy, the film being a rom com and coming-of-age tale dealing also in traditional British class differences. Hanks, who was filming The Da Vinci Code nearby, would pop in often to gauge the movie's progress.

2007 would bring yet more success to McAvoy. First there'd be Becoming Jane, a reunion with White Teeth director Julian Jarrold. Based on Claire Tomalin's biography, this would see Anne Hathaway as the pre-fame Jane Austen, enjoying an affair with McAvoy's improverished student lawyer, an affair that would inspire Austen's passion for life and for writing. Following this would come the heavy-duty Atonement, written by Ian McEwan and adapted for the screen by Christopher Hampton. Set just before WW2, this would see McAvoy as the son of a rich family's cleaning lady, being put through Cambridge by his mum's employer and enjoying a flaming affair with the family's eldest daughter, Keira Knightley. As the film explored the fragile nature of happiness, though, McAvoy's joy is shattered when he's accused of sexual assault by Knightley's little sister Briony (played as an older girl by Romola Garai, McAvoy's carer in Inside I'm Dancing, and then Vanessa Redgrave) and he winds up first imprisoned then stuck on the beaches of Dunkirk.

Having already appeared in musicals and comedies, in thrillers, period pieces, blockbusters and quirky indie delights, James McAvoy has proved himself to be one of Britain's finest and most resourceful new actors. We can only assume that he and his perhaps even more talented wife will be the low-key king and queen of Brit thespianism for years to come. And maybe Hollywood stars, too.

Dominic Wills