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Ewan Gordon McGregor (born March 31, 1971) is a Scottish actor who has had significant success in mainstream, indie, and art house films. He is ranked No.36 in Empire magazine's "The Top 100 Movie Stars of All Time" list. He is perhaps best known for playing the lead role in Danny Boyle's Trainspotting, his portrayal of the young Obi-Wan Kenobi in the prequel trilogy of Star Wars, his role as the romantic penniless writer in the 2001 award-winning Moulin Rouge!, and his motorcycle adventures with friend Charley Boorman. A charismatic, auburn-haired leading man with gray eyes and a heavy brow, Ewan McGregor knew he wanted to be an actor at age nine and by age 16 had left home to work with the Perth Repertory Theatre in his native Scotland. He then migrated to London where he studied acting at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. An early break came with the Channel 4 series "Lipstick on Your Collar" (1993), written by Dennis Potter. That same year the actor made his feature film debut in Bill Forsyth's uneven "Being Human" (released in the USA in 1994) and continued his streak, landing the leading role of Julien Sorel in the BBC miniseries adaptation of "Scarlet and Black", in which he was a 19th-century Frenchman who dreams of becoming another Napoleon but is betrayed by the married woman who loves him. In June 2005 McGregor sang and danced on stage when starred as Sky Masterson in a London production of "Guys and Dolls" at the West End's Piccadilly Theatre alongside Jane Krakowski. That same year, he revealed to Playboy magazine that he had once battled alcohol addiction, but had remained sober for four years. The actor returned to the big screen for the sci-fi actioner "The Island" (2005) as Lincoln Six Echo, a man who lives in a orderly facility seemingly in a post-Apaclyptic world hoping to win the right to relocate to the only remaining pure bio-zone on the planet, only to discover his world was a facade disguising a more sinister existence That film failed to score with audiences, as did "Stay" (2005), a murky psychological thriller that cast McGregor as a shrink with a suicidal patient (Ryan Gosling) who somehow begins invading his dreams and blurring the lines of their realities and individualities. McGregor was born in the Perth Royal Infirmary, was brought up in the nearby small town of Crieff, Scotland, and went to the independent fee-paying school Morrison's Academy. His mother, Carol Diane (née Lawson), is a teacher and school administrator, and his father, James Charles Stuart McGregor, is a physical education teacher. His mother is the sister of actor Denis Lawson, the sister-in-law of the late actress Sheila Gish, and the step-aunt of the late Lou Gish. McGregor attended Guildhall School of Music and Drama in 1988 to study drama. McGregor studied drama for a year at Kirkcaldly in Fife, then enrolled at London's Guildhall School of Music and Drama for a three-year course. He studied alongside Daniel Craig and Alistair McGowan among others, and left right before graduating after snagging the role of Private Mick Hopper in Dennis Potter's 1993 six-part Channel 4 series "Lipstick on Your Collar" (1993). His first notable role was that of Alex Law in Shallow Grave (1995), directed by Danny Boyle, written by John Hodge and produced by Andrew MacDonald. This was followed by The Pillow Book (1996) and Trainspotting (1996), the latter of which brought him to the public's attention. He is now one of the most critically acclaimed actors of his generation, and portrays Obi-wan Kenobi in the first three Star Wars episodes. McGregor is married to French production designer Eve Mavrakis, whom he met while working on the TV show "Kavanagh QC" (1995). They married in France in the summer of 1995 and have two daughters, Clara Mathilde and Esther Rose. McGregor has formed a production company with friends Jonny Lee Miller, Sean Pertwee, Jude Law and Sadie Frost. Called Natural Nylon, they hope it will make innovative films that do not conform to Hollywood standards. Six months before graduating, he won a leading role in Dennis Potter's six-part BBC series Lipstick on Your Collar, and has been working steadily ever since. He made his feature film debut in 1993 in Bill Forsyth's Being Human. The following year, he earned widespread praise and won an Empire Award for his performance in the thriller Shallow Grave, which marked his first collaboration with director Danny Boyle. His major international breakthrough soon followed with the role of heroin addict Mark Renton in Boyle's film version of Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting (1996). McGregor has been featured as the male romantic lead in Hollywood films such as Moulin Rouge! and Down With Love, and in the British film Little Voice. He received excellent reviews for his performance as an amoral drifter mixed up in murder in the British film Young Adam (2003), which co-starred the acclaimed British actress Tilda Swinton. He took on the role of a younger Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Star Wars prequel trilogy, a role originally made famous by Sir Alec Guinness in the original Star Wars films. McGregor took very special care (especially in Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith) in his portrayal of Kenobi to ensure that Obi-Wan's mannerisms, speech timings, and accents closely resemble Obi-Wan's "Alec Guinness Self". In appearing in Star Wars films, he was continuing a family tradition of sorts: his uncle, Denis Lawson, had played Wedge Antilles in the original Star Wars trilogy. McGregor was also offered the lead role as James Bond in the 2006 reboot Casino Royale but he turned it down because he feared becoming typecast. McGregor is one of the few major male actors to repeatedly do full-frontal nudity in many of his films, including Trainspotting, Velvet Goldmine, The Pillow Book, and Young Adam. He also played gay or bisexual characters in two of these Peter Greenaway's The Pillow Book (1996) and Todd Haynes' Velvet Goldmine (1998). In 2005, McGregor lent his voice to two successful animated features: He provided the voice of the robot Rodney Copperbottom in Robots, which also featured the voices of Halle Berry and Robin Williams. He then voiced the lead character in Gary Chapman's Valiant, alongside Jim Broadbent, John Cleese and Ricky Gervais. Additionally in 2005, McGregor played two roles (one a clone of the other) opposite Scarlett Johansson in Michael Bay's The Island and then appeared in Marc Forster's Stay, a psychological thriller co-starring Naomi Watts and Ryan Gosling. McGregor has narrated the STV show JetSet, a Scottish series following the lives of student pilots and navigators at RAF Lossiemouth as they undergo a gruelling six-month course learning to fly the Tornado GR4 – the RAF's primary attack aircraft. In theatre, he starred alongside Jane Krakowski, Douglas Hodge, and Jenna Russell in the original Donmar Warehouse production of Guys and Dolls in London at the Piccadilly Theatre. He played the leading role of Sky Masterson, made famous by Marlon Brando in the movie, and he received the LastMinute.com award for Best Actor in 2005. He was also nominated for an Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor in a Musical. McGregor appears opposite Colin Farrell in Cassandra's Dream, released on January 18, 2008, and will co-star with Daniel Craig in Dan Harris' upcoming film adaptation of Glen Duncan's novel I, Lucifer. From December 2007 to February 2008, he starred as Iago in Othello at the Donmar Warehouse alongside Chiwetel Ejiofor as Othello and Kelly Reilly as Desdemona,a role he will reprise on BBC Radio Three in May 2008. On July 22, 1995, in a village in France, McGregor married Eve Mavrakis, a French production designer, whom he met while filming a guest appearance on the British television series Kavanagh QC. They have two daughters together, Clara Mathilde (born February 1996) and Esther Rose (born November 7, 2001). In April 2006, McGregor and his wife adopted Jamiyan, a four-year-old girl from Mongolia (born June 2001). They currently reside in North London. McGregor refuses to talk about his family in interviews; "because it's private". During the "fly-on-the-wall" filming of preparation for the Long Way Round and Long Way Down journeys, McGregor went to great lengths to keep his children and information that could reveal the location of his house away from the cameras. Unlike travelling companion Charley Boorman, whose daughters often appeared in front of the cameras, McGregor's children were not present at the send-off or any other filmed parts of either adventure. A keen motorcyclist since his youth, McGregor undertook a marathon motorcycle trip with his friend Charley Boorman and cameraman Claudio von Planta in 2004. From mid-April to the end of July, they travelled from London to New York via central Europe, Ukraine, Russia (including Siberia), Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and Canada on BMW R1150GS Adventure motorcycles, for a cumulative distance of 22,345 miles (35,960 km). The trip formed the basis of a TV series and a best-selling book, both called Long Way Round. En route the Long Way Round team took time out to see some of UNICEF's work in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Mongolia. The Long Way Round team reunited in 2007 for another motorcycle trip from John o' Groats in Scotland to Cape Town in South Africa. The journey, entitled Long Way Down lasted from May 12 until August 5, 2007. McGregor has in the past been outspoken against other celebrities, notably fellow Scottish actor Sean Connery, about whom he is alleged to have said that he resented being told how to feel about Scotland "by someone who hadn't lived there in 25 years" it is also said, however, that he later apologised to Connery about this quote. McGregor's brother, Colin, is a Tornado GR4 pilot in the Royal Air Force. Colin performed a fly-by in a jet fighter and then joined the motorcycle team during the early stages of the Long Way Down journey. His father Jim McGregor also rode on sections of both Long Way Round and Long Way Down, while his mother Carol surprised him in the latter stages of his African journey, serving him a can of Coca-Cola at a lodge in Malawi. In a November 2007 episode of Parkinson, Ewan claimed that he has given up alcohol after a period where he was arguably a functioning alcoholic, and that he has not had a drink in seven years. In 2008 he had a cancerous mole removed from underneath his right eye. |
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