It is a long trek from the grey pavements of London’s Holloway Road to the golden boulevards of Beverly Hills, but it is an increasingly well-trodden path for many of the brightest film stars finding work in Hollywood.
The point will be proved tonight at America’s annual Golden Globe awards, where some of the brightest of British stars to be celebrated, including Rosamund Pike, Felicity Jones and Helen Mirren, started out at the National Youth Theatre. Others, including David Oyelowo, Benedict Cumberbatch and Ruth Wilson, can thank the rigorous training they received at Lamda – the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art – for their success.
Tutors at both drama centres have raised their glasses in anticipation on the eve of the ceremony in California and are ready to toast the theatrical tradition that prepares actors to work at the highest level. This year’s strong selection of British nominees, cited for their performances in cinema and on television, are evidence of a continuing appetite for British actors, they argue.
Pike, who is nominated as best actress in a film drama for her role in David Fincher’s dark thriller Gone Girl, has already put her achievements down to her time learning at the youth theatre in north London. Ahead of a series of NYT auditions for teenagers to be held around the country this year, the actress encouraged young hopefuls to “give it a go”. “Being part of National Youth Theatre was life-changing and the most fun I’ve ever had,” Pike added.
The actress, who starred last year in What We Did on Our Holiday, will be up against another British contender who trained at the NYT, Felicity Jones, who plays Stephen Hawking’s first wife Jane in the film The Theory of Everything. The British actresses are in competition with Julianne Moore for Still Alice, Reese Witherspoon for Wild, and Jennifer Aniston for Cake. Dame Helen Mirren, also a former NYT alumna, is in the running for the best actress award in the comedy and musical category for her role in The Hundred-Foot Journey. She is pitted against Julianne Moore again, this time for Maps to the Stars, Amy Adams for Big Eyes, and Emily Blunt for Into the Woods.
Dame Helen has said: “I could only become an actress because of the National Youth Theatre. Without them my career trajectory would have been an awfully lot more difficult.”
Cumberbatch and Oyelowo, who are nominated in the category of best actor in a drama for their roles in The Imitation Game and Selma respectively, are both former students at Lamda. Tutor Rodney Cottier, who has worked at the academy for 35 years, said this weekend that their star potential was clear from the first. Cumberbatch, nominated for his portrayal of mathematician and war hero Alan Turing, arrived at Lamda from Manchester University, where he had studied drama, and his attitude marked him out, recalled Cottier: “It was very different working with someone who very clearly had a passion for dramatic text.”
Oyelowo, who grew up in Oxford, went on from Lamda to appear in the early series of the BBC spy drama Spooks and has been championed in Hollywood by Oprah Winfrey, his co-star in The Butler. This winter he has been hailed by American critics for his performance as civil rights giant Martin Luther King in Selma. His former tutor said Oyelowo had exceptional acting talent and shone in stage fighting competitions.
Despite the quality of his training, Oyelowo is one of a group of black actors who claim they had to leave Britain to find challenging roles. “I had a very nice career here, but it became apparent that there was a glass ceiling on which my head was beginning to bob. The film industry here is so small, and I aspire to do movies so I had to take my plant and put it in more fertile ground,” he said recently. The actor has lived in Los Angeles for five years with his wife, the actress Jessica Oyelowo, and their children. His views echo those of Homeland actor David Harewood, a performer also acclaimed for a portrayal of Martin Luther King, on stage in London in The Mountaintop, who has written for this newspaper about his frustrations with the British film industry.
The new film focuses on three months in 1965 in the Alabama town of Selma. Oyelowo, 38, first read the script in 2007 and has said he felt God intended him to play King, in spite of the fact he was British and had not long been in Hollywood. He had to put on weight and learn how to replicate the pastor’s sonorous way of speaking to a crowd.
Ruth Wilson, best known for her role in the BBC’s drama series Luther and nominated as best actress for her role in the Showtime television series The Affair, is another former Lamda student and her British co-stars in The Affair, Dominic West and Alan Cumming, are also nominated for Golden Globes tonight. Among the other British runners is Ricky Gervais, nominated for his television show Derek, and Clive Owen, nominated for The Knick. Keira Knightley is nominated for her performance opposite Cumberbatch in The Imitation Game, where she plays his fellow Bletchley Park code-breaker Joan Clarke. Downton Abbey, by now an established taste in America, has earned a supporting actress nomination for Joanne Froggatt, as well as a nomination for best show.
But the most likely British victor of the ceremony tonight is Eddie Redmayne, an actor who went straight into acting after studying art at Cambridge, eschewing formal training. He is nominated alongside Cumberbatch and Oyelowo in the best actor in a drama category for playing Stephen Hawking in the acclaimed film The Theory of Everything, opposite Jones. Also nominated are American actors Jake Gyllenhaal for Nightcrawler and Steve Carell for Foxcatcher.
The biopic is popular, but the mood of the Hollywood festival season so far suggests that the innovative American films Boyhood, filmed by Richard Linklater over 12 years, and Birdman, shot by director Alejandro González Iñárritu in what appears to be a single continuous take, are set to sweep up many of the most prestigious awards.
For the third time, the awards will be presented by hosts Tina Fey and Amy Poehler at the Beverly Hilton Hotel.
