My American online friend who keeps me abreast of what Jamie Bell is doing, sent me an e mail a couple of weeks ago to say that Jamie had mentioned me on Facebook. As I don`t have a Facebook account, I couldn`t check it out so Ted gave me the wording. It was “I wouldn`t have a career without Trudy Hindmarsh. Love and support to her and all who attend Stagecoach!” How lovely is that. Thank you very much Jamie.
My American internet friend has sent me links to the trailers for Jamie Bell`s latest films.
Here is `Tin Tin` - due out at Christmas, in which Jamie`s voice is Tin Tin`s. The film is directed by Steven Spielberg and produced by Peter Jackson (of `Lord of the Rings` fame). It should be big!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=op3w_ICK4us
Here is the trailer to `Jane Eyre`- out now. There are a few glimpses of Jamie on there but you have not to blink!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpoKvgiCahA&feature=related
This is an extract that features him:-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5VlXXw9N4E
And here is a scene cut from the `King Kong` film showing Jamie dancing again!
I have copied this article from `The Sunday Times` online 19th March 2011
The Billy Elliot star Jamie Bell is all grown up and living in Hollywood, but his feet are firmly on the ground
It’s always disappointing to see a local hero kowtowing to the cultural imperialists. For British actors, however talented, the process seems all but inevitable. After a few years, or mere months, in Hollywood, their figures and eyebrows dwindle, their hair gets blonder and their opinions blander.
There’s no reason why Jamie Bell, the sweet-faced Tyneside kid who made it big as Billy Elliot in 2000, should be any different. When we meet at a trendy London hotel, it seems clear at first that this process is well under way.
Bell slides into the room, slight, sandy and pale, unobtrusively clad in dark blue but perched on the end of his freckled nose is a pretentiously enormous pair of Woody Allen specs. “Well, there are worse people to look like,” he says, defensively, pocketing them.
The voice is another shock. His trademark Geordie accent has been overlaid with a weird, unplaceable mélange of Received Pronounciation and West Hollywood. And then there’s the matter of his newly buff physique, on display in his latest film The Eagle, which comes as something of a shock for those of us who last saw him in a tutu.
“Hahahahah!” he sniggers when I ask how he achieved the impressive abs. “I’m not delusional, you know. I know I’m 5ft 7in with slightly jug ears. They asked me if I’d do a page on my routine in Men’s Health, but there was nothing to say. I’m not going to pretend I did chicken and broccoli and protein shakes. Not me! I’m the one with the bag of crisps.” So perhaps the Hollywoodisation is only cosmetic, after all.
In The Eagle, an adaptation of Rosemary Sutcliff’s classic teen novel Eagle of the Ninth, Jamie is Esca, a British slave to the Roman commander Marcus Aquila, played by Channing Tatum, who sets off with him on an apparently hopeless quest, climbing vast hills, fording ice-cold rivers, to recapture the standard of the Ninth Legion, a golden eagle, from the savage tribes who lurk the other side of Hadrian’s Wall.
“Chan’s great,” Bell says. “We were very competitive with each other about who had the fastest horse, who could stay in the water longer, which obviously was him. We’ll definitely stay friends.” He cracks his trademark heartbreaking grin. (He gets to smile only once in The Eagle and it is, quite honestly, the high point of the film.) Bell, who was 25 last week, shot to global fame when he was plucked at the age of 12 from a stage school in Stockton-on-Tees to play the ballet-dancing hero in Billy Elliot. His own story is even more unlikely and Cinderella-ish than Billy’s. He was brought up in Billingham, an industrial town near Middlesbrough.
His father, a toolmaker, abandoned the family before Jamie’s birth and his mother, Eileen, struggled to support Jamie and his elder sister Kathryn on her wages as a doctor’s receptionist.
Ironically, it was Kathryn who wanted to dance; Jamie had to tag along to the lessons because there was nobody else around to look after him and he decided to join in. He became a keen tap dancer, carrying off the North of England tap-dance championships in 1998 and winning a scholarship to the Stagecoach school in Stockton-on-Tees.
Just as in the film, he was bullied at school for his arty ambitions and had to hide his tap shoes down his trousers. But it was all worth it.
The director Stephen Daldry auditioned 2,000 boys for the Billy Elliot role. He was so impressed when he found Bell that he appointed himself his surrogate father. Bell moved in to his Hertfordshire home for a while after the film and he still sees Daldry as a mentor.
Daldry oversaw Bell’s early career, which encompassed roles in obscure but well-received indie flicks such as Undertow, Dear Wendy and Hallam Foe, along with a cameo in King Kong. “He’s still incredibly supportive,” Bell says gratefully. “He saw that he could really help someone out, and he did. He’s incredibly talented and he’s such a sweet man.”
Does Bell still ask his advice? “Oh yes. He’s lived a mad life, he’s done it all and he’s achieved so much that it would be silly not to use that well of knowledge.”
For a brief, head-spinning period Bell shuttled between Hollywood and Billingham. One week he was at the Oscars, hearing his name mentioned by Russell Crowe in his acceptance speech for Gladiator, the next he was back in his maths class at Northfields Comprehensive, an experience that he described as “a bit weird”. Eventually, after his GCSEs, he packed his bags and moved to America for good.
Now he leases a house in the Beachwood Canyon area of Hollywood and feels rooted enough to have acquired a white Jack Russell terrier, Cal, named after James Dean’s character in East of Eden, although not a girlfriend. (His last known squeeze was The Wrestler actress Evan Rachel Wood, whom he dated for about a year after they met making a music video for the American punk rock band Green Day in 2005.) “I would like to meet someone, but it’s difficult right now because I’m going backwards and forwards.”
Any homesickness has been somewhat allayed, he declares bizarrely, because Billingham (in one of the most deprived areas in the UK) and Los Angeles are not dissimilar. “They’re both industry towns. The main difference was that in Billingham it was coal, or gas, or paint, and in LA it’s entertainment. But the community sense is there. Everyone that you meet is working on a TV show or is part of Warner Bros’ sound department. I find some solace in that; I do enjoy the industrial mentality.”
Isn`t Hollywood a little more glamorous? “I don’t find it particularly glamorous,” Bell says. “Your mates are just your mates.” Even if they’re Russell Crowe and Anne Hathaway.
All the same, Bell says that LA doesn’t feel like home. “It’s the place I come back to to drop my bags and wait for the next thing. I still feel like a stranger there, for sure.”
He loves the Californian coast but laughs out loud when I ask if he surfs. “That’s ridiculous! You should see the colour of my legs; they’re like alabaster.” And he cringes at the freebie culture of the A-list. “Why should we get things for free? It’s not even out of generosity that people are giving it to you, it’s so you’ll be photographed in it. It’s all a business. That side of things really makes me feel uncomfortable. My mum had to work for everything we had, and that’s important to me, the sense of ‘I earned that’.” His ultimate dream is to live deep in the English countryside. “There’s something about it that evokes comfort for me.”
However, the demands of his career mean that he will probably have to put that ambition on hold for some time to come - 2011 is set to be a big year. Aside from The Eagle, he is appearing in a new film of Jane Eyre as St John Rivers, the charismatic but repressed preacher, opposite Mia Wasikowska, and is starring as the boy reporter Tintin in Stephen Spielberg’s motioncapture version of The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, a role that seems as naturally his as did Billy Elliot.
“I used to love Tintin as a kid,” he says in the wondering tones of someone who can’t quite believe his luck. “I could project everything I wanted to be on him. He doesn’t come with baggage, so you can throw all of your own on to him. Tintin is a beacon of excellence and opportunity. And he’s even got a white dog, for God’s sake.”
On top of these he has another two films in post-production: a thriller, Man on a Ledge, with Sam Worthington, and a smaller film, The Retreat, with Cillian Murphy.
So does he feel that he has made it? Bell wriggles uncomfortably. “I always think it can be better,” he says eventually. Then his characteristic honesty impels him to add: “But now I can say to myself: ‘You know what, mate? You decided to have dancing lessons above a launderette in Middlesbrough and you’ve kept going. It’s all right. You’ve done well’.”
As he lopes out of the room, his specs light up in a blaze of glory.
Click below to go to Youtube for an interview with Jamie Bell about his newly-released film “The Eagle”
Thanks to Ted - my internet American friend who keeps me up to date with Jamie Bell`s latest antics. A new psychological thriller in the offing here.
Click on the link below:-
I came across this interview with Jamie Bell`s mum in the Evening Gazette today on the Gazette`s web site.
Although the article does not mention Jamie`s connection with Stagecoach, I was also invited to the 18th birthday party that his headmaster Mr Youlden talks about. I was sitting at the party with Jamie`s junior school headmaster, George Barber. That is where I had first been in contact with Jamie, when he was a pupil at Prior`s Mill School in Billingham, where I taught for 13 years, before setting up Stagecoach in Yarm. Jamie became one of our original students from those early days in 1997. Jamie left us in the summer of 1998 just as I heard of auditions for a new film that was to be made about a boy who loved to dance. Although he had left us, and I therefore strictly should not have done, I rang his mum and told her to take Jamie up to these auditions. The next I knew was about 5 months and several high-profile casting trawls across the N.E. later, Jamie`s mum rang to say that after multiple call-backs Jamie had been offered the lead role. Although I was obviously very thrilled for Jamie and his mum, I had no inkling (did anyone?) that the film would be such an iconic one - leading to a BAFTA for best actor at the age of 14 years for Jamie and an assured acting career into adulthood - magical!
I was very proud when Jamie began his birthday speech, before cutting the cake, by saying, “Before I start I would like to thank someone who is here, without whom I would not have had the success that I have had”. I was looking around expecting his mum or his dance school teacher to be pointed out - but he meant me - which blew me away! The evening continued to be special when the “Billy Elliot” film`s director Stephen Daldry, who has had a star-studded career in film AND theatre direction, came across with his baby to chat.
The first photo in the article of Jamie and his mum also brought back happy memories, because it was taken at the multiplex cinema at Teesside Park where the “Billy Elliot” film got its own first local film premiere and I got an invite. My abiding memory of watching the film is the wonderful transforming quality of Jamie`s smile on the big screen. I couldn`t watch the film properly for thinking “I know that boy, isn`t he doing a good job”. Happy Days!
Click on the link
‘Photo by Matt Nettheim/Focus Features’
See below for details of Jamie`s role in “The Eagle of the Ninth” out soon and based on a children`s book about lost Roman legion. There are also some recent links to local newspaper articles about Jamie. The information has been sent to me by a fan of Jamie`s who lives in the USA and has come across our web site, whilst researching Jamie. Thanks Ted for taking the trouble to send us this news!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eagle_of_the_Ninth
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1034389/
Gazette links
A very strange thing happened today. as you know my daughter Katie is due to have her baby any day now and we believe that it will be a little girl. I had seen a lovely miniature doll on E Bay, big enough to put into a mini-pram that I planned to make for her for the baby`s arrival. I bid for the doll and won and paid for it and when it arrived, there were two dolls included with a hand-written note which said that because I did such good work with children the lady had sent the doll as a gift. Not only was I touched, as I always am by spontaneous kindness, but I was puzzled as to how she knew what I did for a living. Of course I e mailed her to find out. She said that my name had sounded familiar to her so she had googled it. Fair enough, mystery solved but then I decided that I`d better google myself and see what was up there and I found a whole host of articles about our students that I did not know were there SO thank you Rosie from Edinburgh on 2 counts!!
It was fascinating. I found that there was another Trudy Hindmarsh, working in Southwark council, who is a fan of Mick Hucknall and I found my son`s comments that I had mentioned to the editor of the Northern Echo, made when my son was in Reception Class. Pete Barron had included them in his column as a “things kids say” item. Here is the clip:-
TRUDY Hindmarsh, of the Stagecoach school for performing arts, emailed with memories of son Jonathan when he was in reception class.
“Mam, did you know that Jesus died on Happy Friday?” he announced.
“But you don`t have to worry because he rose from the deck on Sunday.”
On another occasion, he came out to tell his mam that they’d had a great story in assembly about three leopards - and they had bells and were shouting “Unclean! Unclean!”
I`ll be adding any of these discovered articles and links to the web site when I get a chance to look through them properly and add the links to this post
Below you can follow the links I have discovered so far :-
The first article is the final outcome of a visit I made to Radio Tees, last year, to be interviewed by some school girls who believed in their friend`s talent enough to want to get her some advice.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/tees/content/articles/2008/03/13/school_reports_showbusiness_two_feature.shtml
The second is an article that I have never read about Jamie Bell that appeared in The Sunday Mirror
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4161/is_20010225/ai_n14523171/
SO WATCH THIS SPACE
Jamie Bell appeared on BBC`s national morning News programme “Breakfast” this morning (Tues 6th Jan) at about 9.00am, talking about his new film with Daniel Craig called “Defiance”.
Someone than rang to tell me that Zoe Birkett was on the NE ITV news, talking about her impending start for the rehearsals of “Priscilla Queen of the Desert”. She was on the morning and evening bulletins. I have searched for both of these interviews on the catch-up services of both channels but they do not cover these programmes - shame!!