Jamie Dornan is a very ordinary guy. Far from collecting top-of-the-range cars or squandering his fortune on luxury labels, his most prized possessions are a horse, five chickens, three goats, a dog and a cat. He could afford a mansion in the Hollywood Hills, but the actor and former model lives on a peaceful farm in the English countryside with his three daughters and his wife, actress-turned-composer Amelia Warner. After a few years living through the hangover of the blockbuster Fifty Shades of Grey, he now returns as the protagonist of Belfast, a landmark new film directed by Kenneth Branagh. Some insiders are betting on a clean sweep for the Oscars, and just maybe he can shake off the tragic series of events that have marked his life and began long before he became Christian Grey.
Jamie was a happy child. He was born in Holywood in Northern Ireland – not to be confused with Hollywood – and raised in a Methodist family, he attended church regularly until he was six years old. His grandparents on both sides were preachers. But young Jamie was much more interested in sports, especially rugby, than in cultivating his faith. He also showed a precocious interest in acting. At Belfast Methodist College, he was an active member of the drama club. Although he was unaware of it himself, everyone else knew he was star material. That included his father, obstetrician and gynecologist Jim Dornan, who died last March of Covid-19 at the age of 73.
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While his childhood was ordinary, everything changed in 1998. Shortly after his 16th birthday, his mother, Lorna, died suddenly of pancreatic cancer. “It’s something that affects you in a thousand different ways every day. I doubt I’ll ever come to terms with it, unless I go see a therapist who can explain how. Maybe it made me more determined… I still get very angry when I think about it. At my age, I get very frustrated that my mother isn’t here, because I have daughters that she hasn’t been able to meet. It makes me very sad,” he told EL PAÍS in 2016.
Patrick McMullan (Patrick McMullan via Getty Image)
Then in 1999, Dornan lost four of his best friends from high school in a car accident. In 2019, on journalist Jay Rayner’s Out To Lunch podcast, he talked about how the back-to-back tragedies sunk him into depression: “I had a very rough couple of years that I guess I’m still dealing with, both of [those] things today, every day. I had this summer where I’d go out a lot, drink, not really achieve anything. I dropped out of university and I was doing a marketing degree and [had] no interest in any aspect of marketing, and I thought ‘Well fuck this, I’m going to leave’.” His two older sisters, Liesa (who works for Disney in London) and Jessica (a fashion designer based in Falmouth), staged an intervention.
