As the star of Atonement and The Last King Of Scotland takes on the Scottish play at London’s Trafalgar Studios, we look back at James McAvoy’s meteoric career.
10. Shameless (2004)
McAvoy’s character Steve McBride so won the hearts of the readers of a Scottish Sunday newspaper that they once voted him above Prince William in a Britain’s most eligible bachelor poll – proving that the way to the British heart is not obscene wealth but wide boy charm. He certainly won the heart of his co-star Anne-Marie Duff: the two later married.
9. Starter For 10 (2006)
Perfecting his skill at playing the thinking girl’s crumpet, McAvoy twinkled his way through this enjoyable rom com based on David Nicholls’s smash hit novel
8. The Last King Of Scotland (2006)
A career changing performance as the naive white Scottish doctor abroad, Nicholas Garrigan, who is willingly taken into the confidence of Forest Whitaker’s lethally bananas Idi Amin after he treats him for a broken hand. McAvoy has said that he only got the role because other Scottish actors of a similar age were ‘a bit too expensive’ – a claim he’s unlikely to have been able to make since.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ns69SiLayNs
7. The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe (2005)
McAcvoy looked set to quash his flowering career as a bit of a sex pot by playing a hirsute, 150 year old faun with enormous furry ears in the first instalment of The Chronicles Of Narnia. He apparently spent hours practising how to walk like a goat.
6. Becoming Jane (2007)
McAvoy out-Darcied Darcy in this steamy, imaginative recreation of the love affair that supposedly broke Jane Austen’s heart.
5. Wanted (2008)
An intensive relationship with the gym helped the skinny Scot cut a plausible action hero in this completely daft blockbuster, even if his office-nerd turned superhuman assassin still looked relatively puny alongside Angelina Jolie’s heartless, gun-toting Fox. Probably not McAvoy’s finest hour.
4. Three Days Of Rain (2009)
Macbeth isn’t McAvoy’s first foray onto the boards: he starred in Jamie Lloyd’s revival of Richard Greenberg’s 1997 play about three siblings and their parents (played by the same actors) at London’s Apollo Theatre. Incidentally, sleepy theatre critics better hope that McAvoy’s wife Anne-Marie Duff isn’t in the audience for Macbeth: McAvoy famously turned on one snoring critic during the press night for Cause Celebre in 2011 – which starred one Anne-Marie Duff.
3.The Last Station (2009)
A period snooze about the last weeks of Leo Tolstoy as seen through the eyes of McAvoy’s secretary Valentin Bulgakov.
2. Atonement (2007)
McAvoy got to get up close and personal against a bookcase with Keira Knightley in this sumptuous adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel, in which he played a lowly housekeeper’s son headed for the battlefields of Dunkirk, and cemented his position as one of Britain’s most bankable actors.
1. X-Men: First Class (2011)
Another chance to channel his inner nerd-with-sex-appeal, McAvoy took on the role of the donnish, young Charles Xavier who grows up to be Patrick Stewart in Matthew Vaughn’s 1960s-set X-Men prequel. The sixth X-Men film, Days Of Future Past, also starring McAvoy, is due for release next year.
Macbeth is at Trafalgar Studios until Apr 27. www.macbethwestend.com
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