An Officer And A Gentleman

Eton-educated British actor Damian Lewis overcame a near-fatal motorcycle crash and a family tragedy on his way to the spotlight.

by Russell Scott Smith, Us, October 15, 2001

It was a cold winter's night in London when Damian Lewis crashed face-first through a car's windshield and almost died. That evening in 1998, the actor had been buzzing along the chilly, dark streets on his Honda VFR750 motorcycle, heading home from the Royal Shakespeare Company's Barbican Theatre, where he was playing Don John the Bastard in Much Ado About Nothing. Suddenly, a car veered into Lewis's path. His bike rammed the car's front bumper, and he flew over the handlebars; Lewis broke the car's windshield with his chin. "Thank God I had a full-face helmet on," the 30-year old actor says. "If I hadn't, I'm not sure I'd be here now. Or at least my acting career would be very different."

Lewis survived, but he lay unconscious for five minutes and woke up with a serious concussion in his brain's frontal lobe, the region that controls emotions. For the next three months, the normally cheerful Lewis became "irascible and irrational," he recalls. "I would get into arguments with people at the video store for no reason. Or I'd suddenly feel like crying." At first, he wasn't able to do much more than sit at home and do jigsaw puzzles. But he began to get restless, and just three weeks after the crash, he rejoined the cast of Much Ado. On his first night back Lewis abruptly sat down onstage in the middle of a soliloquy. "I gave the rest of my speech from there," he says. "If I hadn't sat down, I would have keeled over. I probably wasn't ready to go back."

Lewis has a way of pushing himself to the limit, even in good times. In November, when he was still best known for playing Laertes to Ralph Fiennes Hamlet on Broadway in 1995, Lewis was invited to Los Angeles to meet with Band of Brothers producers Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg. They were considering him for the miniseries' starring role, as U.S. Army Major Dick Winters, the real-life war hero who led the elite Easy Company paratroop unit from D-day until the end of World War II. Lewis auditioned for Hanks first, and it went so well that the actor thought he had won the part. He went out with a friend to celebrate, he recalls, and "at five in the morning, I was trashed, staggering back to my hotel room." Three hours later, his phone rang with the news that Spielberg wanted to meet him at noon. "I took three showers," Lewis says. "But I was still drunk when I got there. I was shaking and sweating." That didn't seem to matter, however. Spielberg and Hanks were so impressed with Lewis's earnest-yet-cool appeal that they offered him the role on the spot." They were looking for someone who has a moral uprightness without being uptight," says Brothers costar Ron Livingston. "Damian has that. There's something anachronistic about him. Like Henry Fonda."

Lewis developed that quality while growing up in London's upper-class St. John's Wood neighborhood, where his family -- father Watcyn Lewis, an insurance broker; mother Charlotte Lewis, an avid volunteer; and three siblings -- had a house on Abbey Road, just blocks from the crosswalk pictured on the Beatles album of the same name. "I used to take my shoes off to cross the street so I'd look like Paul [McCartney] on the record," he says.

When he was 8, Lewis left Abbey Road for boarding school near Sussex's Ashdown Forest which was the model for Hundred Acre Wood in AA Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh books. At Ashdown House School, where pupils wore uniforms of gray shorts, blue blazers and blue caps, Lewis studied Latin and ancient Greek and starred in the annual Gilbert and Sullivan production. He also played sports and, after graduating from Ashdown, went on to play varsity soccer, cricket, golf and tennis at Eton, England's most prestigious preparatory high school. "I was bordering on what you Americans would call a 'jock,'" Lewis recalls -- but he also loved theater. He put on plays with his classmates, and after Eton he went to the Royal Shakespeare Company's Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London.

Now that Band of Brothers has become a hit (seen by 10 million viewers during its September 9 premiere and 7.3 million on September 16), Lewis may be on the verge of stardom. But misfortune has also marred his American television debut. Last winter, as the production wrapped, his mother was killed in a car accident while on vacation in India. Lewis doesn't like to talk about the incident, but his Brothers costar Matthew Settle says that Lewis "handled the tragedy amazingly well." Since then, he has been trying to get back to life as usual. For the past several months, he has spent much of his time in Manchester, England, where he's shooting The Forsyte Saga, a remake of a 1967 miniseries that will appear on British TV and PBS in the States in 2002.

Lewis finds comfort in his budding relationship with his girlfriend, Katie Razzall, a 30-year-old reporter-producer for the British network Channel Four, whom he met six months ago at a party in London. The couple like to tool around the countryside in Lewis's sports car, a convertible in "basic British racing green," he says, made by the British automaker TVR. In early September, they spent a weekend speeding along country lanes in the Peak District between Manchester and Sheffield. One evening, they stopped for dinner in the village of Eyam, where many of the cottages date back to the 1600s. As the sun set, they settled into the Red Lion, a cozy pub with low ceilings and heavy wooden tables. It was getting cold outside, but there was a fire in the hearth that warmed the couple as they dined on rack of lamb and drank the local beer, Black Sheep Bitter. "That, says Lewis, "is what a weekend is about."

Caption: Razzall and Lewis in August.

Caption: The red-haired Lewis has endured such nicknames as Rusty and Duracell.

The Boys In The Band

Rounding Up The Men Of Easy Company.

by Oliver Jones, Us, October 15, 2001

Matthew Settle

Since returning from his Band Of Brothers duty in November, Settle, who plays the heroic Captain Ronald Spiers, appears to be making good on a batch of New Year's resolutions. He's taking fencing instruction, sailing classes and tap-dancing lessons, and he's going to flight school. "In the old says, actors spent all their time learning new skills," he says. "I'm trying to follow in their footsteps." Settle, who grew up in Hickory, North Carolina -- his father is what he calls a fundamentalist "hellfire and brimstone" Baptist pastor, and his mother is a church organist -- enjoyed traveling in Europe after wrapping the London-based production of Brothers. "I especially love Italy," he says. "The culture, the lifestyle" -- and the women, although Settle, 32, met his Italian girlfriend on the subway in London. "She was reading an article about Mike Tyson in the Times of London and I went up to her and said, 'You don't know anything about Mike Tyson.' I became completely smitten with her," he says. With Settle back home in Los Angeles and his girlfriend living in Italy, their love affair must remain long-distance for now. "I call her every day and tell her, 'Whatever you do, don't marry anybody.'"

Frank John Hughes

To research his role as wisecracking Sergeant Bill Guarnere, Hughes needed enormous stamina. "When [the real-life] Bill visited the set, we would stay up till six in the morning drinking," says the 33-year-old actor of Guarnere, a retired contractor who is now 78. "I'd say, 'Bill, I've got to go to sleep. I have to go to work in an hour.' He would say, 'How you gonna play me if you can't stay up like this? I fought the Germans on no sleep.' He drank us all under the table every night." Hughes. a Bronx, New York, native whose father served in the 25th Infantry in Vietnam before becoming a salesman for a commercial moving company, considered joining the military but opted instead for Berklee College of Music to study jazz drumming and composition. At 18, he gave up the drums for acting and at 19 met his wife, Jelena, an accountant, while shooting a low-budget film in Canada. A year later, the couple married and had a son. Last year, Hughes, who lives with his family in California's San Fernando Valley, took up the drums again. "My son wanted to start playing drums, so I got us a drum set," Hughes says. "Now, we play together. I will go to my grave wishibng I was a jazz musician."

Ron Livingston

According to Livingston, there is one thing that Band Of Brothers gets wrong. "The vets say that they never cursed the way that we do on the show, they never used that filthy language," says the 33-year-old actor, who grew up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, with his father, an aerospace engineer, and his mother, now a Lutheran minister. "They had to give on that because it just didn't feel right to watch a building explode and say 'Gosh darn it.'" Like the character he plays, the hard-drinking Captain Lewis Nixon, Livingston attended Yale, where he majored in theater and English. (His senior project was a documentary on Vietnam veterans.) Livingston, whose younger brother, John, is also an actor (Mr. Wrong), lives in Los Angeles with his fiancée, actor Lisa Sheridan. "We met at a screening of The English Patient," he says. "It was very L.A." Livingston, who plays the new assistant district attorney on The Practice, sees many similarities between what the nation is facing in the wake of the World Trade Center disaster and what the men of Easy company confronted after Pearl Harbor. "All of a sudden, we're placed in a time where we can profoundly affect world history in any one of seven different ways," he says. "Before this, we were all kind of on autopilot."

Michael Cudlitz

Although Cudlitz, who portrays husky, stogie-chomping Sergeant "Bull" Randleman, may be built like a linebacker, the 36-year-old actor hasn't played football since he blew out his knee in a Pop Warner league. "In high school, I was in the band," says Cudlitz, who attended Lakewood High School in Lakewood, New Jersey. "I played the trombone. The band guys got more girls than the football players anyway." Cudlitz met his wife, Rachael, in 1996, when they both went to Los Angeles's Cal Arts. The couple, who have 4-year-old twin boys, live in Los Angeles in a 1930s bungalow that Cudlitz is remodeling himself. The actor says he has thought seriously about explaining the World Trae Center disaster to his children, but he hasn't let them watch the news coverage yet. "My kids are right at the breaking point in terms of understanding things on TV," he says. "When the same image is shown over and over again, they can't tell that there aren't hundreds of planes crashing into different buildings." As the nation faces the prospect of war, Cudlitz ssees Band Of Brothers as an opportunity to put the cost of such conflicts in perspective. "I think [Brothers] puts faces to victims," he says. "It's important that we don't forget that war has real victims."

Donnie Wahlberg

When asked if he has finally decompressed after eight long months of playing steadfast Lieutenant Carwood Lipton, Wahlberg smiles. "I still haven't decompressed from New Kids On The Block," says the 32-year-old actor of his nearly 10 years in the '80s boy band. "If I don't relax soon, I'm going to have a sad damn breakdown." Like his younger brother Mark Wahlberg, Donnie traded in a music career for acting: Since 1996, the Dorchester, Massachusetts-born native from a large (nine children) Irish-Catholic family has worked steadily in movies such as Ransom (1996), The Sixth Sense (1999) and the independent feature Diamond Men, out this month. His family -- wife Kim Fey, a recording engineer, 8-year-old son, Xavier, and newborn baby -- frequently accompany him when he must leave their Los Angeles home to go on location. "We're very nomadic," Wahlberg says. "We're like a pack of hyenas. We don't sit down at the dinner table at six -- we all go for takeout at Baja Fresh." Wahlberg, whose nonstop schedule has left him with stress-related back pain, insists that he's going to start relaxing. "I think I had a breakthrough just yesterday," he says. "I took my son to school, and my wife and I took the baby to the park and jsut sat there and watched some kids fish. I am going to get fishing poles tomorrow and take my son out. I think that'll go a long way to helping me get right."

Neal McDonough

During his training for Band Of Brothers, McDonough, who plays platoon leader and former All-American football player Buck Compton, had a romance straight out of a classic wartime drama. "We met on St. Paddy's Day, the day before I was supposed to ship out for boot camp," says McDonough of his girlfrend, Ruvé, a nightclub publicist whom he met at an Irish pub in London. "The moment we laid eyes on each other, bells went off." But he didn't manage to get her phone number -- "I was an Irishman, it was St. Paddy's Day, so you can imagine the shape I was in." When he returned to London after two weeks of military training just outside the city in preparation for the film, McDonough and a group of his costars dressed up in suits and ties and went out for a night of celebratory drinking. "I saw her walk dow the stairs at the bar," he says. "It was amazing. We have been together every night since." While McDonough -- who just finished playing Tom Cruise's best friend in next year's Minority Report -- is devoted to his acting career, his ultimate ambitions lie elsewhere. "I have to thin owning the Boston Red Sox would be the greatest thing for me," says the 35-year-old, who grew up in Cape Cod, Massachusetts (where his parents ran a motel). "Barring that, I would love to be a congressman or senator from the great state of Massachusetts."