Throwback Thursday to Damian Lewis in A Touch of Frost

Damianista’s note: As he was talking about his early TV work on The Chris Moyles Show the other day, Damian mentioned wearing a speedo on an episode Touch of Frost and inspired me to re-share this post for this week’s Throwback Thursday. Here is JaniaJania taking you back to a 25 year old Damian Lewis on TV!

Before he hit the big time in cable TV, Damian did some smaller, lesser known roles in British television. The role of Adam Weston in a feature-length episode of mystery drama Touch of Frost may not be a role that Damian is particularly proud of, given how disdainfully he spoke of it at the NY Times Talk in May 2014.

Nonetheless, I’d say the role begs remembering, if, for nothing else, to give us a picture of Damian at 25. According to Damian, roles such as this one were the few available to British actors in television in 1996. It was either Merchant-Ivory-esque period drama or stories of the struggles of the underclass left in the wake of Thatcherism, both “classes” of roles Damian would have been uniquely qualified to play, but only later. First, he had to build up a resume with things like A Touch of Frost. So here’s Damian at 25, a Shakespearean trained thespian and, they ask him to get down to his skivvies. Okay, he’s still doing parts that get him into his skivvies some 20 years later, but, hey, who’s counting. As Bobby Axelrod would say:

Those who can, do.

Continue reading “Throwback Thursday to Damian Lewis in A Touch of Frost”

10 Years Ago Today: Damian Lewis and Helen McCrory at Cheltenham Literature Festival

source: gloucestershireecho.co.uk

10 years?!?! Whaaaat? It feels like yesterday.

I was very lucky to be there in the room when Damian and Helen read love poems to each other from The Love Book, a brilliant collection of classic and contemporary love poems that vary from Shakespeare to E.E. Cummings to Maya Angelou coming together in a book as well as in an app. It was a moving and intimate hour with a powerhouse husband and wife team reading poems, teasing each other, and sharing their dynamic chemistry with the audience.

It turns out that when the festival inquired about a possible video recording of the reading in 2014, Helen and Damian said no. Damian tells The Sunday Times:

Continue reading “10 Years Ago Today: Damian Lewis and Helen McCrory at Cheltenham Literature Festival”

Throwback Thursday to Damian Lewis in Noël Coward’s London Calling! – A Centenary Celebration

Damian Lewis is returning to theater stage for a one-night-only charity gala performance in “A Marvellous Party” on November 17 at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London. The gala performance is to celebrate the legacy of British playwright and composer Noël Coward and support three charities; namely, The Queen’s Reading Room, the Noël Coward Foundation and Acting For Others, all united in Noël Coward’s belief that the arts belong to everyone.

The Noel Coward Foundation launched Coward 125, a two-year long celebrations of the life and work of Noël Coward, will now culminate in the star-studded “A Marvellous Party” in 2024, Coward’s 125th birth year. Tickets are selling fast!

And for today’s Throwback Thursday, I would like to revisit a Noël Coward celebration that I was very lucky to see in London last fall. Continue reading “Throwback Thursday to Damian Lewis in Noël Coward’s London Calling! – A Centenary Celebration”

Happy Birthday, Homeland (Or How Brody Turned My Life Upside Down)

At a recent dinner party, we played a game where everyone had to talk about three things they thought changed their lives. I had two moments from my early life: one being the Live Aid concert back in July 1985 (I was 13!) that got me thrilled that the whole world, all of us, were watching it together, and the other was a political assassination of a journalist in Turkey in January 1992 (I was 20!) that taught me that a state can get rid of citizens that insist on looking for the truth. And the third moment I mentioned was Homeland. Because I was a regular academic attending to my own thing until a certain “pesky Brit” disguised as an American POW showed up and turned everything upside down! Homeland made me a Damian Lewis fan for life and I launched a blog in his name almost a decade ago. Go, figure!

Homeland, the show that started it all, premiered on Showtime on October 2, 2011, exactly thirteen years ago today. Continue reading “Happy Birthday, Homeland (Or How Brody Turned My Life Upside Down)”