Paul Bettany - Biography

Name: Paul Bettany

Born: 27 May 1971 (Age: 38)

Where: London, England

Height: 6' 3"

Awards: 1 BAFTA nomination

Come the end of 2003, much fuss was being made of the new breed of Brit actors. Thanks to The Lord Of The Rings trilogy, Orlando Bloom was being feted as the next Hollywood face, alongside Keira Knightley, much in demand after Bend It Like Beckham and Pirates Of The Caribbean. Long live the new flesh, as they say. Indeed, so young, so beautiful were these two that the media were blinded to the inexorable rise of another richly talented individual, Paul Bettany. Having broken into headline roles with Gangster Number One, he'd quietly proceeded through a series of art films and classy low-budget dramas while raising his profile with slots beside Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind and Master And Commander. Suddenly, there he was, a star. And, other than the fact that he'd married Jennifer Connelly, no one knew anything about him.

When he's been written about at all, the stage background of Bettany's family is usually dragged up, as if to suggest that conferred upon young Paul some privileged grounding in the performing arts. He himself has occasionally seemed miffed that people might think he benefited from hailing from acting stock. The background is certainly there. Bettany's maternal grandmother, the daughter of a Nottinghamshire pub landlady, moved to the States in the Thirties, where she married a pianist (later a promoter) and enjoyed a career in musical theatre. Her daughter, Paul's mother Anne Kettle, would be a singer, too, as well as a secretary, and would marry an actor, one Thane Bettany, a former ballet dancer (he actually danced with Margot Fonteyn) who'd served in the Royal Navy (he'd secretly practised his dance routines on the ship's warheads during night duty) before joining an avant garde theatre group. Thane had also appeared at the pre-RSC Stratford Festivals between 1956 and 1958, alongside such luminaries as Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh and Ian Holm, featuring in John Gielgud's The Tempest and Michael Redgrave's Hamlet. Interestingly, he's also the godfather of Sophie Rhys-Jones, Countess of Wessex. Way back, the Bettanys had got to know the Rhys-Joneses when both families were living in Northern Borneo. Thane's widowed father would marry Pat Rhys-Jones, so Thane became step-brother to Chris Rhys-Jones, Sophie's father. Unusually, having divorced wife Anne in 1993, he'd later move in with new partner Andy Little.

Paul was born on the 27th of May, 1971, an older sister having already arrived. For the first nine years of his life, the family would reside in Harlesden, north-west London, then would move to Potter's Bar, just outside the M25 London orbital. Thane had decided that the family needed financial stability and thus became acting coach at a boarding school for girls. Paul claims that, as his mother had long ago retired and his father was a drama teacher, he never felt pushed or even drawn towards a life in acting. Not even seeing Thane in the likes of Roger Moore's North Sea Hijack made him feel that his dad was famous, or glamorous - it was just dad doing his old job.

As a kid, Paul says he was wholly uninspired by his teachers, so much so that he didn't actually complete a book until he was 19. He did fare a little better in the Sea Cadets, where his father placed him in the hope that it might teach the boy a thing or two about life. A lot of time was spent out on the water. But, as with so many others, the kid's real ambition was to be a popstar. He took up guitar (he's still a keen player to this day) and set about mastering the instrument.

Come the age of 16, things changed. First Bettany's brother, 8 years his junior, died in a fall. It was a huge blow for Paul, alienating him even further from his classmates (who's going to understand a pain like that?). Thomas Hobbes' harsh maxim that the life of Man is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short" now made perfect sense - years before it ought to have done. The world had suddenly become a very unsafe place.

Nevertheless, no matter how dangerous the world now seemed, Bettany decided to leave the cosy haven of home and see how bad (and good) the big city could be. Leaving school at the earliest possible opportunity, he took his guitar into London and became a busker, often setting up on Westminster Bridge. Life was fast, very educational and genuinely rough. At one point he found himself sharing a flat with two tiny lesbians and a few thousand cockroaches. After two years of playing for his supper, he realised that though he enjoyed writing songs he hated playing them to an audience, and suffered badly from seemingly incurable shakes. Instead he turned to a more gainful employment, working for a further year at a home for the elderly.

It was now, at age 19, that acting took hold. As said, Bettany dislikes the notion that he sprang fully-formed from a thespian background, but that kind of career must always have been a real possibility for him, far more than it might have been for kids whose dad DIDN'T appear in North Sea Hijack and hold daily drama classes. There was also the question of good familial advice, for young Paul chose to study for 3 years at the London Drama Centre in Chalk Farm. Dominated by the teachings of Stanislavsky, this place demanded that its students delve into Russian emotionalism and Jewish introspection, and was thus known as the Trauma Centre.

Here, though not cited as star-material, Bettany was noted for his drive and ambition.

. Unlike many drama students, upon graduation Paul stepped straight into work, in 1993 joining the cast of Stephen Daldry's acclaimed West End revival of An Inspector Calls, at the Olivier Theatre. Rave reviews were earned and Paul was offered a ten-month tour to America and Australia. Rather than go on tour with the production, though, he elected to stay in London and was soon following in his father's footsteps when he was taken on for a year at the Royal Shakespeare Company (which had replaced the Stratford Festival in 1961). During the 1995-6 season, he'd play Paris in Romeo And Juliet, directed by Adrian Noble, he'd play Decius Brutus and Strato in Peter Hall's Julius Caesar (John Nettles taking the lead), and Richmond in Richard III, where David Troughton would play Richard and Jennifer Ehle the seduced and broken Lady Anne. All three of these would be performed at Stratford's Royal Shakespeare Theatre before moving to the Barbican, and Bettany would also grab some more low-key experience by playing the Drum Major in Woyzeck, starring Dermot Kerrigan and Kate Duchene at The Other Place.

After this, having turned up briefly in episodes of Wycliffe and The Bill, and as a militarily incompetent William of Orange in Sharpe's Waterloo, he would make his big screen debut in Sean Mathias's adaptation of the Holocaust drama Bent, playing alongside such burgeoning talents as Clive Owen and Jude Law, as well as Mick Jagger and Ian McKellen. After this, he'd re-take to the stage in One More Wasted Year and Stranger's House for the Royal Court theatre company, then Joe Penhall's Love And Understanding at the Bush Theatre. This time he would stay with the company when in 1997 it moved abroad to the Long Wharf theatre in New Haven, Connecticut.

More than anything, it was his performances in this play that brought him to the attention of film-makers and he began his climb to the top with The Land Girls. Here Catherine McCormack, Rachel Weisz and Anna Friel played three wildly different young ladies all sent to work a farm in Dorset during WW2. All of them fall for hunky farmer's son Steven Mackintosh, which is particularly hard on McCormack who's already dating an upper crust Royal Navy officer, played by Paul.

Next came a couple of TV efforts. First was Lynda La Plante's four-part thriller, Killer Net, where he played the concerned flatmate of Tam Williams, a psychology student seduced by a vamp and drawn into a world of sin before being dumped. Things go horribly awry when Williams, playing an Internet game that tests your ability to pull off the perfect murder, discovers that real-life is paralleling his game-play. Then there was Coming Home, Rosamunde Pilcher's tale of two families, the Dunbars and Carey-Lewises.

Keira Kinghtley played the young Judith Dunbar, taken in by the rich Carey-Lewises (led by Peter O'Toole and Joanna Lumley) in the 1930s and falling for their grand home, their way of life and their oldest son, played by Paul. Come wartime, Judith (now played by Emily Mortimer) faces the tragic loss of her family and her love. Bettany actually began a relationship with Mortimer in real life. It would not last for long.

. Paul moved on to After The Rain, a very different type of production, being a drama set in South Africa's apartheid period. Bettany played Steph, a disturbed Afrikaner soldier who catches his girlfriend in bed with a black friend. Their relationship is platonic, nevertheless he ties them up and rains his horrendous invective down upon them. It was powerful stuff, adapted by Ross Kettle from his own play, Soweto's Burning, with Bettany's suffering at the hands of his personal demons reflecting the pain and problems of the country as a whole. Paul followed it with another hard-hitting piece, Rosie Thomas's Every Woman Knows A Secret, where he played a young drink-driver who gets his friend killed in an accident. He then engages in an affair with the dead boy's mother, played by Siobhan Redmond, much to the horror of friends and family.

Professionally at least, life was going well. Bettany, having enjoyed a brief but varied and highly pressurised stage career, was using his film parts to test himself in wide-ranging roles. Personally, though, he was a bit of a wreck. A very social beast, he loved a drink, but by now he was also abusing cocaine and Lorazepam. He split from Mortimer and hit a new low as he went to film a new miniseries adaptation of David Copperfield. First he was thrown out of his high-grade hotel for destroying his room. Then he was in trouble for playing football with a cushion in the aisle of a plane bound for Dublin. The series' director, Peter Medek, was extremely protective, keeping Bettany's problems under wraps (ho ho) as best he could. But it was up to Paul to sort himself out, and this he did, after one last trauma. When a diabetic friend went down in his flat, an out-of-it Paul decided against calling an ambulance as there were drugs and assorted paraphernalia all over the place. Searching his friend's gear he found a syringe, assumed it to be insulin and performed the operation himself. All was OK but might so easily have been disastrous. When sober, Bettany recognised how close he had come and decided to turn his life around.

One thing that certainly helped was the offer of his first leading role, in Paul McGuigan's Gangster Number One. This saw ageing crime lord Malcolm McDowell looking back into his Sixties past when, his younger self being played by Paul, he joined the gang of sleek, cool Reggie Kray-like Freddie Mays (David Thewlis), the renowned Butcher of Mayfair whom Paul would eventually betray and usurp. It was a thrilling performance.

Bettany, who researched the part by hanging out with Butch Reynolds, architect of the Great Train Robbery, was superb as the nattily dressed bully-boy who, in one horrific scene, carefully takes off his Saville Row suit so he won't spoil it as he's chopping and sawing one of his victims to pieces.

. His next release was that David Copperfield series. A US TV production, this bumped up its American appeal with Sally Field as Aunt Betsy Trotwood and Michael Richards playing Mr Micawber just like his Kramer character in Seinfeld. Paul would appear as James Steerforth, Copperfield's school pal who eventually does the dirty on him and elopes with his beloved Emily.

After this he concentrated entirely on the Silver Screen. His next part was in Robert Louis Stevenson's The Suicide Club, where Jonathan Pryce ran a society of rich folks who, each having had enough of this world, drew monthly lots to see who would be next to die and who would be the one to kill them. Bettany would play the openly suicidal Shaw, introducing to the society a recently bereaved David Morrissey.

This would be followed by Kiss Kiss (Bang Bang), his second London underworld flick. This was a strange tale, far removed from the knockabout foolishness of Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels. Here Stellan Skarsgard played a hitman who, having introduced prot'g' Paul to the business, decides to retire. But assassination is not an easy game to leave and, while Skarsgard is looking after retard Chris Penn (well, if plying him with liquor and women can be regarded as "looking after"), dark forces come to claim him. As said, it was a strange film, a kind of cross between Rain Man and The Mechanic, but it showed Paul was on the lookout for interesting projects rather than the usual slushy fare. It also saw him making great friends with Skarsgard, after whom he would name his first son.

Next came a big disappointment in Dead Babies. Based on one of Martin Amis's early novels, this saw Paul as the smart, control-freak ringleader of a gang of hedonists who gather in a rambling gothic mansion for a crazy weekend of drugs and sex. It was supposed to reveal a deep-rooted social torpor and cultural malaise, but instead raced from being a school reunion comedy through druggy farce to a slasher fiasco. Bettany, who'd expected it to be a more meaningful project, was not slow to voice his disapproval.

No matter. By now Hollywood was calling. Or rather director Brian Helgeland was making it his personal business to make Hollywood take note. Helgeland, an Oscar winner for his LA Confidential screenplay and further known for helming Payback, the sharp Mel Gibson-starring remake of Point Blank, was casting for a new movie, to be titled The Sin Eater. He watched Paul's audition videotape and thought he saw something special. Then, having eventually turned down The Sin Eater and moved on to A Knight's Tale, he showed the tape to the producers who were distinctly unimpressed.

Bettany was English, but he wasn't Jude Law, so why use him? Undeterred, Helgeland went to London and filmed a new audition tape for Paul himself. He would not take no for an answer, realising that if he backed down on this he'd have to back down on everything. Paul was hired for his first big Hollywood production.

. Now A Knight's Tale turned out to be fairly controversial. Not only did many critics take umbrage at Helgeland's near-total disregard for the film's historical background (it was very, very loosely based on Chaucer), they were also infuriated by its post-modern comic edge and a contemporary rock soundtrack. Even Errol Flynn had never been this cheeky. Furthermore, it was later discovered that, on the posters for the movie, along with those of at least three other current Columbia productions, the glowing comments from a reviewer in some small Connecticut town had actually been made up by a company marketeer.

Nevertheless, Bettany came out of it well. Though Heath Ledger (later to star when The Sin Eater finally saw the light of day) headlined as a lackey who impersonates a knight and becomes a jousting champion, Paul was outstanding as his helper, Chaucer. An inveterate gambler who's lost his clothes in a bet, he turns up naked (he's actually naked at some point in nearly all his films) and agrees to forge documents of nobility for Ledger in exchange for food and clobber. He then takes on the role of herald, playing it like a WWF announcer with such shameless gems as "(Heath) is a wild force of nature. We walk in the garden of his turbulence!"

And he had a great time. When critics questioned the film's historical accuracy, he playfully challenged them all to a fight. He also enjoyed a real-life relationship with his co-star Laura Fraser, though this would soon be broken up by the couple's cruel work schedules. But more would come from A Knight's Tale, for Helgeland was not finished yet. Now armed with the audition tape and the film, he began forcing his Hollywood peers to view both, peers including the hugely respected Ron Howard. The evidence of Bettany's talent was incontrovertible - what could Howard do but cast him in his latest project, A Beautiful Mind. By his own admission, Bettany had never won a role so easily.

This movie was something different again. Here Russell Crowe starred as John Forbes Nash, a brilliant Princeton mathematician who, after suffering schizophrenic breakdown, recovers to take the Nobel Prize. During his college days, when all around him shy away from his intensity and lack of social grace, he has just one real friend, his room-mate Charles Herman (played by Paul). Herman, an enigmatic English scholar, is accepting of his difficult buddy, supports him and inspires him to persevere with his great work.

Once again, Paul had a ball. He forged an excellent working relationship with Crowe and, socially, they'd play Tom Waits songs together and perform skits from Cook and Moore's notorious Derek and Clive cannon. And then there'd be romance, for Bettany would hook up with Crowe's screen wife Jennifer Connelly (she'd win an Oscar for her efforts). They'd be married on New Year's Day, 2003, Stellan arriving the following August. Paul would also take on Connelly's son, Kai.

Paul might now have taken the part of serial killer The Tooth Fairy in Red Dragon but, keen to test himself further, instead joined Nicole Kidman and his mate Skarsgard in Lars Von Trier's art production, Dogville. First, though, would come The Heart Of Me, a 1930s-set drama where he played a successful businessman, married to straight-laced Olivia Williams, who'd also played alongside him in Dead Babies and A Knight's Tale (though her performance as his wife there can only be seen on the extended DVD version). Unfortunately, the marriage is loveless and Paul embarks on a raging affair with Williams' free-spirited bohemian sister, Helena Bonham Carter. Williams wants to stay married for appearances sake, Helena would follow love despite them, and Bettany is too weak to decide either way. Can a way be found for the sisters to repair their relationship?

Now came Dogville. Inspired by Brechtian theatre, the movie would contain no natural light and houses, steeples, even dogs would appear as shapes painted on the floor. The action would take place in a remote former mining town in the Rockies. When Kidman shows up on the run from mobsters, it's philosopher Paul who lectures the locals on morality until they agree to hide her. There is a price, naturally, a price that rises so high that only bad things can happen.

Bettany claimed that, though his agent and accountant were miffed by his Red Dragon decision, he learned more about acting from Von Trier than he could ever have expected. It was an important experience for he now re-entered the Hollywood cauldron at its hottest, playing alongside Russell Crowe once more in Peter Weir's mega-budgeted Master And Commander: The Far Side Of The World. Based on a couple of Patrick O'Brian's seafaring bestsellers, this saw Crowe as Captain Jack Aubrey, battling the French during the Napoleonic War. Bettany, meanwhile, played his conscience and sidekick Dr Stephen Maturin, the ship's surgeon and a naturist who'd much rather be sketching bugs on the Galapagos than exchanging cannon-fire with the damn Frenchies.

Once more Bettany and Crowe performed well together, even knocking out violin/cello duets below decks. Bettany would prove an excellent foil, questioning Aubrey's Ahab-like obsession with the destruction of the French ship Acheron, as well as perhaps possessing darker motives of his own. He'd also provide a scene of bleak but hilarious comedy when performing a bloody operation on himself, his turn earning him a BAFTA nomination.

Now there'd be no stopping him. Next he reunited with his Gangster Number One director Paul McGuigan for The Reckoning. Here he'd play a 14th Century priest on the lam after engaging in inappropriate shenanigans with a parishioner. Taken on by a troupe of actors led by Willem Dafoe, he arrives in a town where a woman is about to be sentenced for witchcraft and murder, the actors attempting to show the townsfolk the truth of the matter by way of a special performance.

Next up came Wimbledon, where he was a veteran tennis player who's slipped to Number 157 in the world rankings and is losing heart fast. But his ambition is rekindled when he meets Kirsten Dunst, enfant terrible of the US circuit. It's her first Wimbledon, his last - can he go one step further than Our Timmy and actually win the dratted thing?

Wimbledon was not a success but Bettany was nevertheless still considered hot property in Hollywood. Having appeared in one segment of the art-house collection Stories Of Lost Souls (he'd play a con man successfully turning over a mark), he'd feature heavily in two of 2006's biggest productions. First would come Firewall, directed by Wimbledon's Richard Loncraine. This would see Bettany as a cool, cruel, supremely well-prepared crook who kidnaps the family of security chief Harrison Ford and demands Ford transfer $100 million into an offshore account. Of course, like hundreds of Brit villains before him, he fails to anticipate the extraordinary resourcefulness of yer average American Joe, as well as that of his wife and pesky kids.

Suddenly specialising in major bad guy roles, Bettany moved on to perhaps the year's most highly anticipated movie, The Da Vinci Code, based on Dan Brown's ludicrously over-achieving novel and directed by Ron Howard, earlier helmsman of A Beautiful Mind. Here Bettany would star as the psychopathic albino Silas, a religious freak addicted to pain who murders of behalf of his boss The Teacher, a rich Brit obsessed with discovering the Holy Grail. Drawn into Silas's dark world would be professor Tom Hanks who, along with Audrey Tautou, would investigate a world-wide plot involving the Grail, the Vatican, deadly sects and the descendants of Jesus Christ.

Having squeezed a bewildering variety of work into a few short years, Paul Bettany is surely ready for whatever is thrown at him next, be it blockbuster, romance, comedy or art-house oddity. Already he appears to have done it all. The next decade will surely see him continue his relentless rise.

Dominic Wills