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Title edit
Christopher Eccleston Info
Description edit
The following biography by Rebecca Flint, in the All Movie Guide gives an excellent summary) A remarkable actor who brings a vibrant intensity to his performances, Christopher Eccleston is widely held to be one of Britain's most talented actors. Primarily known for his portrayals of working-class men, Eccleston has won international attention for his work in such films as Jude and Elizabeth. A product of the Northwestern English town of Salford, where he was born on February 16, 1964, Eccleston enjoyed a happy working-class upbringing. A poor student with a love of television, he initially wanted to be a professional soccer player. At the age of nineteen, however, he realized that acting was his calling, and enrolled in London's Central School of Speech and Drama. As an actor, his early influences had been Ken Loach's Kes and Albert Finney's performance in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, but he soon found himself interpreting the classics, performing the works of Shakespeare, Chekhov, and Moliere. At the age of twenty-five, he made his professional stage debut in the Bristol Old Vic's production of A Streetcar Named Desire. Relatively unemployed as an actor for some years after his graduation, Eccleston took a variety of odd jobs at a supermarket, on building sites, and as an artist's model. His luck began to change in 1991, when he was chosen to play the protagonist of Let Him Have It. He won acclaim for his haunting portrayal of Derek Bentley, whose real-life murder of a policeman and subsequent hanging for the crime was the subject of dispute in the British legal system, as Bentley had the mental age of a nine-year-old. Eccleston's handling of the role paved the way for more work, and he was soon starring opposite Robbie Coltrane in Cracker, a popular British television series. He stayed with the show from 1993 until 1994, when he was cast in Shallow Grave, the stylish thriller from Danny Boyle, John Hodge, and Andrew MacDonald, the team who would later make Trainspotting. The film, which starred Eccleston, Ewan McGregor, and Kerry Fox as three flatmates with a corpse on their hands, proved a success, and Eccleston won praise for his portrayal of an unhinged accountant. More television work followed in the form of Hillsborough (1996), and the same year Eccleston won the title role in Michael Winterbottom's Jude. Co-starring with Kate Winslet, he garnered widespread praise for his interpretation of Thomas Hardy's tragic hero, and he began to attract the attention of American audiences. This attention was heightened two years later when he was cast as the dastardly Duke of Norfolk in Elizabeth: both his chilling performance and the film itself received wide acclaim. The same year, Eccleston starred alongside Renee Zellwegger as an Orthodox Jew in A Price Above Rubies; the film was a relative disappointment, but it did allow the actor to break away from the character types that he usually played. In 1999, Eccleston could be seen in David Cronenberg's eXistenZ and in Heart, a black comedy in which he starred as a man so consumed with jealousy over his wife--whom he believes to be having an affair--that he gives himself a heart attack. The same year, he collaborated again with director Winterbottom on With or Without You, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival. (Rebecca Flint, All Movie Guide) In the last few years Chris has continued to take on a variety of roles but its fair to say that international stardom that he so richly deserves has not come his way. He is possessed of a prodigious talent and has the ability to completely inhabit a role, to completely subsume his own persona and become the character. His many fans hope that in future he gets the freedon to pick the roles that he truly wants to do but that he also gets the opportunity to reach a wider audience. No one should miss out on seeing Chris perform!
Contact edit
- christophereccleston.info
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- Leeds
- GB LS1 2SZ
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- +44.07710958432
