Jamie Bell Movies and Career Information

Jamie Bell (born Andrew James Matfin Bell; 14 March 1986) is an English actor. He is perhaps best known for playing the title character in the film Billy Elliot (2000), for which he won the 2001 BAFTA Award for Best Actor. In 2005 he starred opposite Evan Rachel Wood in the 2005 Green Day video "Wake Me Up When September Ends" directed by Samuel Bayer. Jamie Bell was born in Billingham, in the Borough of Stockton on Tees, England, where he grew up with his mother, Eileen, and older sister Kathryn. His father, John Bell, a toolmaker, left before Bell was born. Bell began his involvement with dance after he accompanied his sister to her ballet lessons. He was a pupil at Northfield School, then the Stagecoach Theatre Arts school. He was a member of the National Youth Music Theatre. In 1999, he was chosen from a field of over 2000 boys for the role of Billy Elliot, an 11-year-old boy who dismays his working-class widowed father and older brother by taking up ballet. Bell acted as Honorary Jury President of the 2001 Giffoni Film Festival. Since his film debut in Billy Elliot, he has appeared as the crippled servant Smike in an adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby, a young soldier in