Biograhical
Stuff: "from Showbiz.com"
Once upon a time, the indubitably
dashing British actor Rufus Sewell was known to U.S.
audiences primarily (if at all) for his roles in a pair
of BBC imports: the 1994 miniseries adaptation of George
Eliot's Middlemarch, which aired on PBS; and the John
Schlesinger directed Cold Comfort Farm, which was
released as a feature film in 1995. Sewell's visibility
took a quantum leap in 1998, however, with back-to-back
starring turns in the sixteenth-century romance Dangerous
Beauty and the bleak-future thriller Dark City. In less
time than it takes to say "Ralph Fiennes," the
thoroughly British Sewell was anointed Hollywood's latest
Limey du jour.
Descended in a long line from Joseph Sewell, a roguish
English highwayman deported to Australia in 1830, Sewell
was born in the Twickenham district of the London borough
of Richmond-upon-Thames. Shortly following his birth,
Sewell's father, an Australian animator whose career was
most distinguished by his work on the Beatles' Yellow
Submarine, left Sewell and his older brother in the care
of their mother and moved to central London's Soho
district. His mother, who wanted to ensure that her
children were reared to be as open-minded as possible,
allowed young Rufus to parade around in the buff whenever
he pleased until he was eight years old. When Sewell was
ten, his father died, a tragic event that plunged the boy
into a period of preadolescent rebellion that lingered
into his teenage years. During this refractory phase,
Sewell dyed his hair, painted his nails, wore mascara,
and became an accomplished shoplifter; he also landed in
juvenile detention on more than one occasion and was even
picked up once on suspicion of being a male escort (the
charge was ultimately dismissed). In 1986, he commenced a
career in acting primarily as a means of providing
himself with, as he later recalled to one interviewer,
"sex and free sandwiches."
Following three years of formal training at London's
Central School of Speech and Drama, Sewell made his
professional theatrical debut in a production of
Shakespeare's As You Like It staged at Sheffield's
Crucible Theatre. During the next three years while he
was busy with the standard starving-actor routine, his
repertoire of odd jobs came to include (among other
things) road sweeper, carpenter's assistant, and rock-and-roll
drummer.
Sewell's first significant break came along in 1991, when
he landed a major supporting role in the coming-of-age
drama Twenty-One, a vehicle for actress Patsy Kensit (who
would later create a spectacle by wedding Oasis frontman
Liam Gallagher). Upon ascertaining that the bright-eyed
actor was not "one of those fussy bastards,"
the second-assistant director issued Sewell a trailer
that was actually a slightly modified portable toilet
equipped with one secondhand, foam-padded chair.
Awestruck by the amount of free food available on the
set, Sewell subjected himself to additional mortification
when he was caught attempting to make off with a
prodigious quantity of sausage rolls and chicken wings.
Though Twenty-One played only briefly in the States, the
film won Sewell a modicum of notoriety in his native
Britain, and the next year witnessed his triumphant
return to the stage in an acclaimed West End production
of Making It Better.
Though his next movie role was a mere supporting part as
a "phone-sex pest" in 1993's execrable
empowerment farce Dirty Weekend, Sewell's star was rising
as rapidly at the box office as it was on the stage. The
same year Dirty Weekend hit theaters, he briefly left a
highly successful London stage run of Tom Stoppard's
Arcadia to fly to Los Angeles to read for the role of
brooding bloodsucker Lestat in Interview With the Vampire.
Tom Cruise ultimately plucked the plum part, which
prompted Sewell to wryly remark, "Me and Tom Cruise,
we're always going up for the same parts. He won this
time." Prominent appearances in such independent
fare as A Man of No Importance and Carrington won Sewell
the notice of American critics and Hollywood producers,
and a much-ballyhooed casual encounter with pop icon
Madonna was blown into a minor affair by the London
tabloids, further heightening his public profile. In 1995,
Sewell added a heralded lead performance in a Broadway
production of Translations to his impressive stage
career; that same year, fellow Brit Emma Thompson was
added to his equally impressive sum of bogus reputed
affairs.
Not that all of Sewell's womanizing has proven purely the
stuff of tabloid fabrication and innuendo: in 1995, he
ended a lengthy relationship with British actress Helen
McCrory; and 1996 saw him briefly date fellow rising star
Kate Winslet, with whom he'd become acquainted while
playing Fortinbras in Kenneth Brannagh's film adaptation
of Hamlet. Sewell, who makes his home in the Hampstead
district of London's Camden borough, has been sharing
space with fashion journalist Yasmin Abdallah since 1997.
They married in March of last year and have since split
up.
In the wake of Dangerous Beauty and Dark City came roles
in the John Turturro-directed comedy Illuminata, which
also features Christopher Walken and Susan Sarandon; and
the cross-cultural romance The Very Thought of You, which
co-stars Joseph Fiennes and Monica Potter. Fans can
expect to see plenty more of the aristocratic-looking
Brit at the box office. Recently Bless the Child was
released and his next film coming out next year is A
Knights Tale which will also star Heath Ledger and At
Sachem Farm which also stars Minnie Driver and Nigel
Hawthorne.
The handsome actor was introduced to an entirely new
audience in the 2000 ABC TV miniseries Arabian Nights, in
which, as Ali Baba, he had to make the famous fairy tale
command "Open sesame!" sound like he'd just
thought of it.
Sewell appeared in the 2000 supernatural box-office bomb
Bless the Child as a Satanic cult leader; the film was
also a low point for co-stars Kim Basinger and Christina
Ricci. He was back in the saddle, so to speak, with the
modernized action film A Knight's Tale as the dramatic
foil to the movie's young hero, Heath Ledger.
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