Jamie Bell

About Jamie Bell

Jamie Bell (born 14 March 1986) is a BAFTA-winning 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.

Bell was born in Stockton on Tees, England, where he grew up with his mother and older sister. His father left after his birth. Bell was a pupil at Northfield School, then the Stagecoach Theatre 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 Deathwatch, a teenager on the run in Undertow, a gun-toting pacifist in Dear Wendy, and a disaffected Southern California teenager in The Chumscrubber. In 2007, he played the title character in Hallam Foe – for which he was nominated for the best actor award at the British Independent Film Awards – and appeared as himself in lonelygirl15 spin-off KateModern.