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Theatrical Releases Coming to Streaming

Get a closer look at these actors from their many TV and streaming series roles.

Streaming Stars, Then and Now

James Brian Mark Purefoy was born and brought up in Taunton, Somerset, England, the son of Shirley (Taylor), who ran an employment agency, and Anthony Chetwynd Purefoy. After leaving school at the age of 16, he took a succession of different jobs, including working on a pig farm and as a porter at Yeovil District Hospital, before travelling and working extensively throughout Europe.

At 18, James returned to college to take his A-Levels, one of which was drama. It was there that he realised that this was something he felt inspired by, and so applied for and was accepted onto the acting course at the Central School of Speech and Drama.

Whilst playing the title role in "Henry V" in the first term of his final year at Central, he was seen by a casting director from the RSC and invited to immediately join the company in Stratford. Although initially asked only to play Ferdinand in Nicholas Hytner's production of "The Tempest", he left the RSC two years later having performed in eight productions, and been directed by the likes of Adrian Noble, Roger Michell, and Gene Saks playing, amongst other, Edgar in "King Lear" and Malcolm in "Macbeth". Over the next six years, he divided his time between theatre and television. In the theatre, he worked with Katie Mitchell on "Women of Troy" at the Gate; Matthew Warchus, Ken Stott, and Jude Law on "Death of a Salesman" at the West Yorkshire Playhouse; Iain Glen in "Hamlet" at Bristol Old Vic Bill Alexander in a critically-acclaimed season at Birmingham Rep, playing leading parts in "The Servant", "The Way of the World", and "Macbeth"; and with Simon Callow, Joseph Fiennes, Rupert Graves, and Helen McCrory, on "Les Enfants du Paradis", again for the RSC.

As well as appearing in the BBC's landmark period drama The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1996), he has always chosen to do a wide variety of parts on television to avoid being typecast. From the psychopathic rapist in BBC1's Calling the Shots (1993) with Lynn Redgrave to the fraudster Darius Guppy in LWT's "The Prince"; from the urbane observer Nick Jenkins in Channel 4's A Dance to the Music of Time (1997) to the sad stalker in Granada's series Metropolis (2000), James has always managed to confound people's expectations of him. Over the last few years, he has been busy making feature films, on average at the rate of three a year. Early credits include Jedd Wainwright in Feast of July (1995) for "Merchant Ivory", and as the bisexual Irish baker, Brendan in Rose Troche's Bedrooms and Hallways (1998), from the alcoholic roustabout Tom Bertram in Mansfield Park (1999) to the wannabe "Bond" actor Carl Phipps in Maybe Baby (2000); the gambling, womanising "Daniel" in Women Talking Dirty (1999) with Helena Bonham Carter to the noble, enigmatic Prince Edward in Brian Helgeland's A Knight's Tale (2001).

He has continued to surprise those who seek to pigeon-hole him in his film career, always choosing to play parts that juxtapose strongly with the one he has just completed. In 2002, he returned to the theatre to play the rake Ned Loveless in Trevor Nunn's acclaimed production of "The Relapse" at the National Theatre in London, before embarking on the biggest challenge he has yet faced: playing "George" in the big budget George and the Dragon (2004), with, among others, Michael Clarke Duncan, Val Kilmer, Piper Perabo and Patrick Swayze. The movie was released in the summer of 2003. He lives alone in London.

In the July 4, 2001 Newswatch, Wild West End column: &quot;There was one
woman I was absolutely infatuated with, but she had no interest in
me. I was very young at the time and thought the way to prove my love
was to write a book for her. It ran for pages and pages and I had it
bound in leather to give to her. But it still didn&#39;t have the desired
effect.&quot;

The age of chivalry isn&#39;t dead, is it? It doesn&#39;t even have to be a man or a woman that you could be chivalrous to. If somebody&#39;s in trouble you give them a hand.

If you find yourself always playing the villain, or if you find yourself being typecast into a corner where you&#39;re not happy then that&#39;s probably rather miserable, but if I have been typecast I am reasonably happy about it as what I&#39;ve been typecast as ain&#39;t so bad&quot;

&quot;Ah, nudity. That&#39;s quite a recent thing, the nudity. It&#39;s come in the early
autumn of my career.&quot; (Jan. 2006)

The first job I ever did was Equus on stage, as the boy, and I was 17, and we opened the show with me naked in the spotlight being examined by doctors. That was my entrance to the stage, so anything after that was easy. Also, for some reason, nudity was never shameful, it was never brought up in my household when I was a kid, there was no &#39;dirty, dirty sex&#39;. It&#39;s not like we all ran around naked in some horrid 70s nightmare, it just was never an issue, and because it was never an issue I&#39;ve never been embarrassed, I guess.

Quotes

James Purefoy

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