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Daily Telegraph - StarLife: James Frain

May 10, 1996

Advising you to look out for James Frain would be pointless: in the coming months it will be hard to avoid him. The first sighting will be on the big screen in Thaddeus O'Sullivan's shockingly violent Nothing Personal, which opens on October 18. In it Frain plays Kenny, a Loyalist squad leader battling his way through one blood stained night in Belfast. Making the film was tough, he says, but more because of the cold they endured than the vicious thuggery of the role: "making a film is a very practical matter; you're worrying about how to do a scene, which angle to hold your gun..."

In the case of Macbeth, Penny Woolcock's documentary style drama which was filmed on location in Birmingham's Ladywood Estate, what worried, or rather enhausted Frain who plays the lead, was the gruelling intensity of his part. To be screened in December as part of the BBC's Performance series, the film portrays a Macbeth high on Temazepam, wielding iron bars and baseball bats. Frain, who had never played Shakespeare before, was bowled over by the poetry of the language. "But it was so emotional. I got to the end thinking I definitely don't want to be a murderer anymore."

As luck would have it his next role, which he took on immediately, was Philip Wakeham, the gentle lyrical hero of George Eliot's Mill on the Floss, now dramatised by the BBC. "Philip is a hunch-back who has an intellectual love affair. He has real moral courage; it was a much more pleasant part to play."

Versatility has been the keynote of Frain's career so far; fans will remember him as Peter Whistler in Sir Richard Attenborough's Shadowlands and Jules Trevenick in the pretty television series The Buccaneers. Aged 27, he comes from a solidly middle-class background in Essex, his father a retired City trader, his mother a housewife. His interest in acting first sparked at school, "but at that stage I thought drama school would be a bit poncy, and I wanted to do something academic and interesting, so I went to the University of East Anglia to study drama and film."

Once there, the bug really bit. With friends he formed a company which took plays up to the Edinburgh Festival and, having tasted success, decided he needed serious training. During his third year at The Central School of Speech and Drama, he was offered his part in Shadowlands. Until then, he says, film had been a vague ambition "up in the clouds somewhere", but having tried it he found he felt much more at home in front of the cameras than on stage. He abandoned Central..."once you've done a job like that other doors open much more quickly than you could ever have anticipated."

In fact, Frain can boast that in the three and a half years since he left Central he has worked solidly. In November he hopes to be in Paris, starring in Julian Temple's film about the life of French director Jean Vigo. "After that I've no plans - give me a break, I just want to be where the good parts are." In time he would like to both write and direct, "but that's way down the line for me. Right now I'm perfectly happy acting."

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