Beneath the Etonian charm of Damian Lewis beats the heart of a ruthless ginger ninja. The actor tells Christa D'Souza why he thinks that, in modesty-obsessed Britain, ambition is a dirty word. Photograph by John Spinks.

by Christa D'Souza, Telegraph, October 22, 2005

At about 7:30 pm, Damian Lewis and I are ushered to a table in the restaurant at the National Theatre. Currently in rehearsal here for his role in Marianne Elliott's production of Ibsen's Pillars of the Community, he has not quite decided whether we should "do the whole dinner thing" or just have a drink.

"I know it sounds horribly luvvie-ish," he says in his cocksure rasp, "but I'm so absolutely and utterly distracted by the play [in which he plays the lead role of ruthless businessman Karsten Bernick, who will stop at absolutely nothing to prevent his murky past being dredged up], that what I really need to do is go home and get an early night. ..."

"Oh well, goddamit, maybe just one course," he relents as the waiter gestures to take away our cutlery. "A duck spring roll or a steak perhaps. Anyway, look, you choose away, why don't you, while I make this quick call, then I'm going to switch it off and be yours entirely."

Lewis's public-school charm -- he is an Old Etonian -- is legendary in the business. As the veteran theatre producer Thelma Holt put it when I told her I was seeing him: "Take a flak jacket, because, darling, that boy is dangerous."

Though not quite as rugged in the flesh as he is on screen, not quite as -- how to put it -- thrusting as he seems in all those red-carpet paparazzi shots, his shirt unbuttoned just so to reveal a hint of ginger chest hair and with some pretty blonde on his velvet-jacketed arm, Lewis is undeniably attractive. One can see why, in other words, women such as Kristin Davis, Tamara Beckwith and Sophia Myles (his co-star in the television drama Colditz) have all been so beguiled by his charms. Not that the "Ginger Ninja" -- a self-imposed nickname to pre-empt those tiresome redhead jokes -- is the least bit available any more. After splitting up with his longtime girlfriend, the Channel 4 news reporter Katie Razzall (who in 2004 married Lewis's friend the actor and fellow Etonian Oliver Milburn), he is now going out with the actress Helen McCrory (Sienna Miller's co-star in As You Like It), opposite whom he appeared two years ago at the Almeida in Five Gold Rings. But more of this later.

It has been six years since Lewis, 34, was plucked from theatrical obscurity by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks to star in their $120 million Second World War television series, Band of Brothers, and expected to become a household name overnight. And yet, although well rid of the "promising" tag, thanks to his magnificently restrained performance as Major Dick Winters in Band of Brothers (and his portrayal of the sexually repressed Soames in The Forsyte Saga in 2002), you would be pushed to lump him in the same category as, say, Jude Law, Ewan McGregor or even his great mucker Joe Fiennes (all contemporaries of his at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama). Until now, anyway.

Apart from two new television roles -- Benedick in a slick, modern-day version of Much Ado About Nothing, and the lead in Stephen Poliakoff's 1990s-set drama, Friends and Crocodiles -- Lewis has no fewer than four films coming out. There is Lasse Hallström's An Unfinished Life, in which he plays Jennifer Lopez's violent white-trashy boyfriend ("hands down the most unattractive character I've ever played in my life"). This is closely followed by Chromophobia, Martha Fiennes's Altman-esque tale of upper-middle-class life in contemporary London. Starring alongside Kristin Scott Thomas, Penelope Cruz and Ralph Fiennes, Lewis plays Marcus, "an intelligent, urbane lawyer for whom crisis is just around the corner," as Martha Fiennes later describes it on the phone. "Damian didn't put a foot wrong with it," she says. "He absolutely understood the character, how to convey that restrained emotion, in a modern rather than slightly caricatured, period-costume way."

Then there is Stormbreaker, an adaptation of Anthony Horowitz's teenage bestseller, in which he plays, opposite Mickey Rourke and Alicia Silverstone, the Russian hitman Yassen Gregorovitch (something his nephews and nieces are very pleased "Uncle Damian" is doing).

First, though is his starring role in Lodge Kerrigan's Keane, a harrowing story about a man's downward spiral into schizophrenia after his seven-year-old daughter is abducted -- a role, according to the industry gossip, that could win Lewis an Oscar nomination. (This is satisfying, no doubt, after press reaction to his first foray into Hollywood, the 2003 big-budget adaptation of Stephen King's Dreamcatcher, "which still makes my balls slightly disappear into my stomach when I watch it").

Kerrigan, the cult American director of Claire Dolan and Clean, Shaven, says he first became aware of Lewis, as most of Hollywood did, after Band of Brothers, and was so impressed by his faultlessly accented performance that he cast him in the role of William Keane almost immediately.

"Although there isn't anything remotely similar in the two characters," Kerrigan explains, "I was just really, really impressed by the control he had of his craft. I certainly wasn't looking for a star or someone who would 'sell' the movie. I wanted someone who could portray that fine line between mental health and mental illness, who could sustain that theatrical intensity throughout without any special effects."

In order to research the role, Lewis spent weeks visiting "clubhouses" in New Jersey for recovering schizophrenics and trawling around the Port Authority bus station to observe what it was like to be mentally ill and homeless. "I had a conversation with this one woman who told me she'd just come back from singing in a club and that her name was Tina," he recalls. "I said, 'Tina who?' She said, 'Tina Turner,' and started telling me how Ike was and how she had to get back home to him. I asked her where 'home' was and she told me it was one of the subway carriages. That sort of encapsulated for me how it could all be so searingly funny but painfully sad at the same time. The difficulty, I suppose, was getting close to these poor people and respecting them, too. ...

"But although the film is about schizophrenia, I see it more as a film about grief and loss, portraying how an event can happen in a very short time and change your life irreversibly."

It is impossible not to draw a parallel here with Lewis's own life. Four years ago, soon after Band of Brothers aired, his mother, Charlotte, was killed in a car crash while holidaying in India. Lewis received the news, as did his brother Gareth and elder half-siblings, William and Jennifer, in the middle of the night, when he was in bed.

"There is," he says shortly, "something profound and complex about losing a parent, traumatic for anyone, I imagine, but made worse, possibly, if you don't have any time to prepare. ...

"But I like to hold on to what I think is the Buddhist attitude to death, where one leaves one's spirit or one's essence in places that one has been, so that, say, I might find you in a tree if we picnicked there one summer's day. So if I were there a year later I might feel you there. I don't know if that sounds like a bunch of hokum. ..."

Describing himself with typical self-effacing inaccuracy as a "norf London boy," Lewis was born and bred in the affluent environs of St. John's Wood, the son of Watcyn, a reinsurance broker, who married Charlotte (a descendant of the Bowaters printing dynasty) after her first husband, the father of William and Jennifer, died.

If talent is born out of hardship, then Lewis is the exception to the rule. Indeed, he can drum up hardly any unhappy childhood memories. He recalls how he and Gareth were forever doing plays for their parents behind the sofa. "One I remember in particular we did with an Iranian boy who lived across the road, about the life of a piece of chewing gum which kept travelling from one place to the next." And how being sent to boarding school at the age of seven "was one of the happiest times of my life, like being transported back to pre-industrial England, being on the corner of Ashdown forest, playing in the rhododendron bushes, inhaling the smell of cut grass and all that."

Eton, he allows, was not quite as laidback and easy an experience, but one he enjoyed none the less, being "good enough at sport" and not exactly fraught with the worry of getting into university. As his mother had wisely told him, "If you want to chase girls, do sport and get a grad three, then don't bother. ..."

Lewis is adamant that Hollywood is by no means "the pinnacle," that as far as being considered for an Oscar nomination is concerned, "although I'm not for amoment suggesting I'm impervious to that kind of flattery," he doesn't necessarily consider that whole "award thing" a measure of success.

"I mean, take Simon Russell Beale," he shrugs. "He never had a Hollywood career, never did any TV really, and look at him."

On the other hand he seems meticulous about doing what he wants to do, as opposed to what other people want him to do -- famously turning down the role of the baddie in Die Another Day, because, as he put it at the time, "you can be Bond, or you can be the Bond girl, but you can't be anything in between."

Significantly, alongside his brother Gareth and two other partners, he has put together a production company, Picture Farm, which has just received funding for its first film, The Baker (Lewis will both star and co-produce).

"There's no doubt I am ambitious," he explains, enunciating each word carefully, "but if anything, I am ambitious for choice, because choice gives you elements of control. One should not seek total control because then one would never be happy, but trying to achieve an element of it is, I think, a good and healthy thing. And ambition is a word, in my opinion, that is often used much too pejoratively."

As for that national characteristic of self-effacement, he thinks we Brits seriously need to get over it. Despite being an offender himself (almost by default more than anything else), he believes, like an American, that modesty doesn't do anyone any favours. As he recently told an interviewer, he considers himself "an anomaly among actors because I like myself."

"Like myself?" Lewis cries with mock indignation, "Er. Correction. Who loves himself. No, no, I'm joking. Note to self: irony does not work in print.

"Look, put simply, I slightly resist the idea of the tortured artist, the self-effacing, dysfunctional hermit type who only finds expression in front of an audience, under the spotlight, on a stage. I know people who feed off that in order to feel whole and I don't want to be one of them, because by nature I'm not bashful or shy.

"Although I feel more happy, settled, more calm, more fulfilled here at the National than I have done for years, and film and TV are, in a way, a happy, happy diversion for me, they do bring with them a certain degree of recognition, certain perks and trappings, which I'm much too shallow not to enjoy."

He is very flattered, for example, by the invitation from his friend the fashion designer Jasper Conran to model for him (not that he has said yes -- "let's say the question's been mooted"), as he is by all the parties he gets invited to. "What can I say, I accept invitations and I enjoy going out ... perhaps, it has to be said, a bit too much sometimes."

Though maybe less so these days, now that he is going out with the alluring Ms. McCrory, whose name he does not mention but whom he reluctantly acknowledges is the woman with whom he is currently "in love." "And that's all I'm going to say, though I'm very happy to talk about the subject of Being In Love."

"I very much respect the institution of marriage," he goes on in his mildly pontificating way, "and the only way to maintain a long-term relationship with someone, in my view, is simply to continue to find them delightful.

"It's not that painful, soul-searching love you might have had at 21 in some crappy six-month relationship, it's about there being the potential for that moment when you steal a glance at that person and suddenly find it, well, delightful -- the way they look out of the window ... or indeed, wash themselves in the shower. I think the reason people have affairs is because they're trying to recreate that six-month honeymoon period. Well how about creating that with just the one person? It must be possible, if you're disciplined. Too much choice, you see, that's the killer for a lot of people. I think that certainly is the killer for me. ..."

It is late and Lewis does suddenly look very tired, that pale, thin skin almost blue-tinged under this unforgiving foyer light. Would I like it if he got me a taxi at the stage door (he himself is going to bike back to his flat in Camden)? Although to be honest, he points out, it's just as easy to get one on Waterloo Bridge. The off he whizzes into the clear autumnal night, looking, it suddenly strikes me, like a ballet dancer with that sinewy, straight-backed frame and dainty, slightly out-turned feet.

Keane screens at the London Film Festival on October 30 and 31, and opens nationwide next year. Pillars of the Community is previewing now at the National Theatre. Much Ado About Nothing is on BBC1 next month.

Caption: Above: Damian Lewis being directed by Lodge Kerrigan in the upcoming film Keane. Below: Lewis with Sarah Parish in a modern-day version of Much Ado About Nothing for the BBC; with Emma Malin in the second series of The Forsyte Saga (2003); playing Major Dick Winters in Band of Brothers (2001).

Caption: Left: Lewis playing Jennifer Lopez's boyfriend in An Unfinished Life. Below: With his real-life girlfriend, Helen McCrory, in Five Gold Rings at the Almeida Theatre in 2003.