Fifty Shades of Jamie Dornan (14 page)

Such praise from two of the TV industry’s greatest writers could well have turned Jamie into an overnight diva. However, regular visits home to Belfast and London, and staying in touch with childhood friends ensured that the model remained incredibly grounded. Free time away from the camera saw him indulge in stag dos abroad, nights out in London’s Soho on whisky tasting sessions with old school friends and frequent visits to New York. ‘My friend hairstylist Harry Josh holds a brilliant birthday party every year at the Gramercy Park Hotel, New York. My best nights are always in NYC,’ Jamie admitted.

The heart-throb model was also in continuous contact with former bandmate David Alexander, who was giving a music career a second shot. In support of David, who was now headlining solo shows in top London haunts Notting Hill Arts Club and Ronnie Scott’s, Jamie had started to backtrack on his views about his short-lived foray into music, which he had previously described as ‘terrible’. ‘I’ve pulled the reins in on that a bit, because there were other people involved,’ he told
The Scotsman
of his time in Sons of Jim, ‘but I didn’t have a lot of belief in my personal capabilities. I essentially wasn’t fulfilled by it, but we had some good times. I would do a lot of different things differently if we did it again.’

Also, although Jamie was starting to get noticed out and about, much to his great joy the times were still few and far between. ‘Two girls just walked by me in street. Girl 1 (whilst pointing at me) “Is he cute?” Girl 2 “No, he looks like a creep.” Erm I can hear you!’ Jamie admitted to fans on Twitter. ‘In a cafe. Was asked my name for the order. I said “Jamie” they said “okay Jimmy” I said “no it’s Jamie”, they said “oh Jerry!” I said “fine”.’

Even when judging a Calvin Klein underwear competition in London, Jamie was clearly managing to go incognito, as a scout from his own modelling agency pulled him off the street and asked if he’d like to take part in the Europe-wide contest to find the next male model. The prize was a luxury trip for two to South Africa and a year-long contract with Select. ‘They stopped me outside TopShop and thought I could enter this competition. They thought I could probably make this whole look work. Poor girl she said: “I’m from Calvin Klein, would you like to model underwear” I said “no” and she said: “please, go on, it would be great” and I said “erm no, no, no” and she chased me down the street and gave me her number but alas I didn’t enter!’ he described.

Life was good for Jamie and never more so than when he was back in Belfast. His father Jim and stepmother Samina had built a comfortable family home together and Jamie, along with his two sisters, made regular trips back there. Returning to Belfast, particularly for St Patrick’s Day and, most importantly, Christmas – a family occasion with ‘a lot of seasonal Guinness’ which Jamie had never missed – was a chance to catch up with loved ones and recuperate. It was also helping to keep the model-turned-actor grounded. Jamie tweeted soon after finishing the
Once Upon A Time
shoot: ‘Home to Belfast to find my Dad’s added a putting green to the house. Very pleasing! #noplacelikehome.’

Family was indeed incredibly important to Jamie; in fact, of all the successes in the past few years, family matters were the most important and becoming an uncle had been his proudest moment of all. ‘One of my sisters is expecting her first child, that’s the most exciting thing in my life at the moment, to be
honest. I’m going to be the best uncle in the world, that’s the plan anyway. I can’t wait,’ he told the
Evening Standard.

His father Jim was also proud of becoming a grandfather for the first time and admitted that, despite having delivered thousands of babies, having a new child born into the family was something really special. ‘I don’t really feel like a grandfather I feel more almost like a brother, which sounds ridiculous but I just enjoy the children so much,’ he admitted a few years later, ‘and Samina is really enjoying our granddaughter Delphine and of course she’s a genius, she can count to twenty and she’s not even two yet!!’

As Jamie approached his thirtieth birthday in May 2012, it was a good time to reflect on all he had achieved in his life. ‘I’m really excited while I’ve loved every second of living in London during my twenties I’ve got more acting lined up and I’m fulfilled professionally and personally,’ he admitted in that year.

Most importantly, under the radar – and despite a spectacularly busy work schedule, a burgeoning new career as an actor and a busy social life mixing with Hollywood’s rich and famous – Jamie had fallen in love. Three years before, the actor hinted that he had finally found someone special, telling a newspaper: ‘I’m definitely not single. I’m in a pretty serious relationship actually.’ While it was early days back then and having nurtured the relationship away from the public eye, Jamie was now certain she was ‘The One’. But who was this leading lady in his life? And would she really turn long-standing bachelor Jamie, desired by millions of women across the globe, into a happily married man? Only time would tell, but things in the romance department were certainly looking promising.

A
melia Warner is breathtakingly beautiful. Jamie was introduced to the actress by friends on the LA scene during a trip to Tinseltown in 2009 and by all accounts it was a match made in heaven.

Amelia was a popular, well-established actress with a string of TV and film credits to her name, had a secret penchant for reading ‘the classics’, was a talented musician, loved eating delicious high-calorie sandwiches in hidden-away cafes and, crucially, loved a pint of Guinness. She couldn’t have been more perfect for the hamburger-obsessed, music-mad bookworm that was Jamie Dornan.

Their similarities were numerous. Amelia had first-hand experience of the darker side of fame, having dated and ‘married’ Hollywood star Colin Farrell as a teenager. Not unlike Jamie’s relationship with actress Keira Knightley, Amelia had endured
her fair share of crazed fans, intrusive paparazzi and being the ‘plus one’ on red carpet events during her year-long romance with the Irish actor.

Jamie and his new love interest, it was fair to say, were certainly not going to be the kind of couple who courted fame in the celebrity sense. The duo had also endured similar hardships in their careers, particularly as they both shared a dislike and fear of the LA auditioning scene.

At the time of their first meeting, the Calvin Klein model was still a novice at the ruthless pilot season where hundreds of actors flood to Hollywood each spring to audition for the latest parts on offer. The pretty Londoner, meanwhile, had been through the mill for almost a decade; she had landed her first movie role at seventeen and was pretty jaded by the whole process too. She wasn’t the only Hollywood star to hate the annual tryouts;
Miss Congeniality 2
actress Leslie Grossman, said of it, ‘The process of trying to land a part in a pilot can be exhilarating, heart wrenching, thrilling, stressful, devastating, heady and hair-raising to name only a few of the emotions they inspire. Imagine a bunch of wild animals that haven’t eaten in a year and someone throws a big raw steak in front of them. That’s pilot season to actors.’

Hardened to the constant competition, rejection and uncertainty of the acting game, Amelia admitted that her only way of coping was to quash every competitive bone in her body. ‘I’m ambitious, but not competitive. You’d drive yourself crazy if you were. You know, there are actually enough jobs out there for all of us,’ she said four years before meeting Dornan. ‘I don’t
even really want to talk about how I hate LA. It’s so English to hate LA. I’d like to say I love it, but I don’t. It’s such a weird place. If it were my choice, I wouldn’t spend a day there.

‘Everything shuts at eleven. And everyone thinks they’re so crazy and wild and liberal and they’re not! So much work goes on there, but so much s**t goes on there, too.’

The UK – and specifically London – was clearly where her heart was and coincidentally Amelia had grown up as an only child just ten minutes from Jamie’s pad in Notting Hill, in west London. Like her new model boyfriend, she loved spending weekends browsing through the bric-a-brac and vintage clothes of Portobello Road’s world-famous market and having dinner at one of Jamie’s favourite nearby haunts, the Electric Diner.

Their childhoods, however, were poles apart. While Jamie’s idyllic upbringing was spent in a sprawling, two-parent family home in a leafy suburb of Belfast, Amelia was raised by her single mother – actress Annette Ekblom – on a Ladbroke Grove council estate. Following in the footsteps of her mum, who starred in the original West End cast of
Blood Brothers
, Amelia was involved in youth theatre as a teenager – just like Jamie – and was noticed by a scout while performing in a school play. ‘I began acting at school in Herefordshire and I always liked it, though I didn’t necessarily think I’d do it for a living. My plan was to go to Goldsmiths College to study History of Art, but someone saw me in a play at school and told me that I should meet this agent,’ she told
The Telegraph
. ‘I started to get work and so I deferred my place at university.’

A string of roles in UK television productions followed,
including
Kavanagh QC, Casualty, Waking the Dead
and the BBC miniseries
Aristocrats
. Hollywood soon came calling and Amelia starred in the US feature film
Mansfield Park
, alongside Lindsay Duncan and Jonny Lee Miller, and in the Hallmark Production of
Don Quixote
, with John Lithgow and Bob Hoskins.

In 2000 she starred in the BBC adaptation of R.D. Blackmore’s
Lorna Doone
, where she played the lead role of Lorna; later that same year, at the age of seventeen, Amelia was cast as a child bride who gets corrupted by the Marquis de Sade in hit movie
Quills
, starring Geoffrey Rush, Kate Winslet and Michael Caine.

Despite starring alongside so many Hollywood greats – an incredible achievement for such a fresh-faced schoolgirl – acting had left a bad taste in her mouth. In fact, mirroring Jamie’s feelings towards modelling, she knew that the film business wasn’t her true calling. ‘I was thrown into the deep end but I hadn’t expected any of it,’ she said of her high-profile role in
Quills
. ‘It was overwhelming and when I was on set it was the moments when my scene was being filmed that I disliked it the most.

‘To be an actress felt wrong; I don’t know why that was. I thought I was so lucky to have the work but was never happy.’

Amelia’s twelve films after her first small part in
Mansfield Park
in 1999, where she played a teenage Fanny Price, also included playing Charlize Theron’s sister in sci-fi thriller
Æon Flux
in 2005, when she was twenty-three. Then, in 2008, at the age of twenty-six, and a year before meeting Jamie, she gave it all up. Fed up with being ‘thoroughly miserable’ as an actress, the pretty starlet decided to pursue a music career. It was something she
had always dreamed of, claiming that singing and songwriting had always been integral to who she was and citing film scores as one of her biggest influences. ‘The constant pressure of having to prove myself as an actress didn’t sit well with me. I got fed up with acting because my heart was never in it. I’d be in LA auditioning in front of thirty people. The feedback that I always got was that I didn’t want it,’ she explained. ‘I was up against lots of actresses who would fight tooth and nail for a part but I didn’t have the passion. I didn’t want to suffer through the moments of nervousness. I felt exposed and judged all the time. So I thought it was best to get out.

‘Music is my soulmate but that’s what stopped me from doing it for so long. I felt like if I get judged on this that would be devastating. But at least I have the passion to get through it.’

Under the name ‘Slow Moving Millie’ – a joke between family and friends who had always known her as ‘Millie who wanted to be a professional musician’ – Amelia spent two years forging ahead singing, playing the piano and songwriting. ‘I spent so much time figuring out what I wanted to do that the name Slow Moving Millie is a joke because I am so slow to work it out. Having been an actress, this felt like a different part of me. It is a separate identity,’ she described.

The idea of all that inevitable public scrutiny that went with being a famous actor was also a massive turn-off for Amelia, who had experienced it first-hand during her whirlwind, year-long love affair with Irish star Farrell when she was just a teenager. The couple met at the premiere of her movie
Quills
in September 2000 and got engaged soon after. However, the duo
made world headlines when they secretly married on a beach in Tahiti, only to split four months later. Serenaded by ukulele players and with ‘no family invited’, the marriage was completely sensationalised in the press, including reports of how Farrell had tattooed her nickname ‘Millie’ on his ring finger.

Thanks to Amelia wanting to set the record straight, though, it later transpired that the union wasn’t legally binding. ‘We didn’t actually get married – it’s not actually true. I think we’ve been too polite to deny it. We had a ceremony on a beach in Tahiti that was by no means legal and we knew it wasn’t. It was just a thing we did on holiday. We went shark feeding and then we did that. We booked them both on the activities desk at the hotel,’ she told
The Sun
newspaper some years later. ‘It really wasn’t this secret wedding that no one was invited to. It was lovely, it was silly, it was sweet but by no means was it a serious thing and I think my mum thought it was quite funny.’

Amelia dumped the actor in November 2001 and both were heartbroken. ‘I loved him so much,’ she told
The Observer
newspaper several years later. ‘I had the most amazing times of my life with him. He was a fantastic partner. I would have married him for real. But we were too young. I had stuff to do and he had stuff to do.’ Farrell was equally devastated: ‘I was madly in love. Jesus, it was a whole thing. I asked her to marry me. I had a ring. There was a time I thought I’d spend the rest of my life with this girl. That time didn’t last that long, and that was that.’ Soon after their split, Farrell became known as something of a Hollywood ‘bad boy’, filling his days with
Playboy
models, sex tapes, cocaine-and-whisky binges and rehab.

Amelia’s mother Annette clearly didn’t think Colin had been a bad influence; in fact, he had clearly charmed his way into her affections when dating her daughter. ‘I don’t recognise all this stuff I am reading about Colin at the moment. He never used to swear and behave like that,’ she told a newspaper after the split, when Farrell was making headlines for his bad behaviour. ‘In fact, when he was with Amelia he was very sweet. He was from a nice family and was a lovely young man, polite and well behaved. I can only assume that his “bad boy” behaviour is to do with his career, which seems to be taking off. He is probably putting it all on.’

Not that Amelia would ever have needed protection, it seemed; behind her sweet, angelic exterior lurked a feisty and fashionable girl-about-town, who at the age of twenty-two was bold enough to tell a newspaper that she had bought all her friends vibrators for Christmas. ‘I think every woman should have one. I can’t believe they haven’t already. They always say: “Oh no, I couldn’t possibly buy one for myself. But then, if someone else were to get me one”,’ the then actress divulged.

By the time Jamie came across Amelia, she had blossomed into a more sedate – still stunningly attractive – incredibly talented musician by trade. ‘She is beautiful – delicate waifish build, with vast and decadently lashed eyes, an auditorium-enchanting smile and skin all luminous and brilliant like the moon; she is poised, a touch grungy, a touch princess,’ one gushing critic once said of her. ‘The beaaautiful actress and songstress is shy, charming and downright talented. Her music is hauntingly beautiful,’ a music blogger proclaimed in 2010.

Whatever Amelia’s first impressions of handsome Jamie, it must have seemed funny to think that he, meanwhile, had been recently compared to her famous ex, since he was being touted within the film industry as the ‘new Colin Farrell’. ‘He’s Irish, dark-haired and can grow great facial hair, so he’s being promoted as the next Colin Farrell’ the
Mail on Sunday
claimed.

Jamie and Amelia’s union couldn’t have come at a more exciting junction in their lives. Both had finally found direction and, indeed, had undergone something of a job swap: Jamie had chosen to be an actor, desperate to forget his short-lived career in Sons of Jim, whereas songstress Amelia boldly admitted that she never wanted to act again. Their past experiences in notoriously difficult professions would certainly have helped them to sympathise with each other as they tried to get to the top of their chosen careers.

While Jamie had landed his first big TV role in
Once Upon A Time
, Millie’s music career had also taken off. In July 2009 she had written and performed the song ‘Beasts’ for a Virgin Media TV commercial and a second single, ‘Rewind City’, had also been used for another advert for mobile phone giant Orange. In October 2011, Amelia had finally achieved ‘the dream’. She had been signed by Island Records ahead of the release of her cover version of The Smiths’ 1984 B-side ‘Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want’, which had been selected as a soundtrack to the John Lewis Christmas advert for that year.

By 2011 they had also set up home together, as Amelia had moved into the Notting Hill house that he once shared with his father, Jim. Despite their relationship being kept under wraps,
proud Jamie clearly couldn’t contain his excitement for Amelia and wrote on the social media network Twitter: ‘All in the UK, get on I tunes or get to record store and buy “please please” by the wonderful Slow Moving Millie. Out today. @Missmillieuk.’

Two months later, Amelia released her first studio album, ‘Renditions’, which included ten ‘chilled out’ covers of 1980s hits. The collection of tracks was chosen as Amazon’s Album of the Week and, although it was well received by reviewers and music lovers alike, it only reached eighty-nine in the UK charts.

Her Christmas single, however, made the Top 40, reaching a peak position of thirty-one. Amelia was over the moon. ‘When I got signed to Island Records it was a relief. It was scary walking away from a job that was making me money. I was scared I’d regret it – but this has proved to me that it wasn’t crazy to throw it all away,’ she said at the time.

Another of Amelia’s recent decisions – to move in with Jamie – had also proved a success and it was obvious to all and sundry that they were a couple deeply in love. A two-week trip to Los Angeles, where Amelia was writing her album, saw the pair indulge in a few of their shared passions, including a Dr. Dog gig, visiting old friends in the city and ‘a proper American breakfast of pancakes and crispy bacon’ in a diner. The Californian city had become a second home to the pair where, as Jamie confessed, they tended to spend half the year ‘drinking, playing table tennis, bumming around’ blissfully undisturbed by his impending celebrity status.