Jude Law

“We never lose sight of the idea,” Jude Law, one of five members of Natural Nylon, explained in a recent interview. He and fellow actors Sadie Frost (also Law’s wife), Ewan McGregor, Jonny Lee Miller and Sean Pertwee have taken on Hollywood with a Brit Pack film production company, not unlike Kenneth Branaugh’s Renaissance, that could become the thinking performer’s answer to movie industry standard fare.

Law, though, has spent some years as a darling of that industry. On stage by age 12, the young actor left school at 16 to tread the boards full time with the National Youth Music Theatre. After The Fastest Clock in the Universe, The Snow Orchid, Live Like Pigs, Death of a Salesman, Pygmalion, Ions, and the British television productions The Tail of Gloucester, The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, and Families, Law was cast in the stage play Les Parents Terribles. That last work was renamed Indiscretions for Broadway and re-cast, with only Law kept on. New York loved the handsome Englishman, and a Tony nomination ensured wider recognition.

Law brought the perfect look and well-acted consistency to a string of (mostly “selfish and shallow” sometimes “cruel and dark”) characters in Bent (1997), I Love You/I Love You Not (1997), Gattaca (1997), Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997), Psychoville (1998), Music from Another Room (1998), Wilde (1998), Final Cut (1998), and Love, Honour & Obey (1999). His shallow rich man role in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) netted him an Oscar nomination, a Golden Globe nomination, and a British Academy of Film & Television award win to add to his early career Olivier Award for Outstanding Newcomer (theatre), a 1995 Theatre World award and the London Evening Standard Most Promising Newcomer award (for Wilde). Recently and soon-to-be-released works are Natural Nylon’s The Hellfire Club, eXistenZ (2000), Enemy at the Gates (2000), The Wisdom of Crocodiles (2000), The Score (2001), The Good Shepherd (2001) and A.I. (2001).

Off-screen Law and Frost married in 1997, three years after they met each other on the set of 1994’s Shopping – one of those films that helped convince the pair that a new production company was needed. The couple has two sons (one a step-son to Law) and an infant daughter. Law is adored by fans – “The epitome of the word talent” begins one webpage; “The Actor Voters [Most] Want Creasing Their Sheets” says a Jane magazine reader poll. He has been on People magazine’s list of the 50 Most Beautiful People; he bears the title “Millennium It Boy”; and he’s a favourite of interviewers, granting them articulate and honest answers.