Jude Law
The BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role represents one of the clearest formal recognitions in Jude Law's career, a distinction that points toward the sustained work he has accumulated across stage, screen, and television.
Law was born on December 29, 1972, in Lewisham, and holds British citizenship. His early schooling took him through John Ball Primary School and The Halley Academy before he attended Alleyn's School. From those origins he developed a career that spans an unusually wide range of performing and creative roles: stage actor, film actor, television actor, and voice actor, as well as film producer, film director, and television director. He has worked in English throughout.
His stage work brought him the Theatre World Award, an honor that sits alongside his BAFTA for supporting screen performance as evidence of recognition in more than one discipline. That movement between live performance, film, television, voice work, and production marks a career that has not settled into a single format but has shifted across different modes of creative work over the decades since his beginnings in Lewisham.
Law has also received the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, a decoration that adds an international dimension to the recognition he has gathered over the course of his career. Taken together, the Theatre World Award, the BAFTA for Best Actor in a Supporting Role, and the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres form the documented honors of a British actor and filmmaker who was educated at Alleyn's School and began life in Lewisham.
Quotes by Jude Law
Jude Law's insights on:
The only film I ever made for money was something called 'Music From Another Room', which I really didn't like.
I only want to do the kind of work that I would like to go and see, that’s going to teach me something new, that involves working with people I can learn something from and I can give something to.
I think it’s a bigger risk following a part that plays up your looks than it is to try and carve out a career as an actor.
Look, how many stories have I broken? Hundreds. How many have proved to be untrue? There isn’t one.
When someone like Steven Soderbergh asks you to do a film you know you’re in good hands. You know it’s going to be slick, and it’s going to be intelligent, and it’s going to have a kind of style to it, and I would probably have done anything to be really honest.
It’s interesting to see how people bring different things to them. I think it comes down to the universal appeal of the Holmes-Watson that they can keep being discovered in different ways.
There are always seasons to a career and perhaps always the grass is often greener, you’re often looking at other people’s careers going, “Damn, they get all the good roles. Why didn’t I read that? Why didn’t they ask me to do that?”
I was an optimist, a great champion of the human spirit. And I lost that for a time. I feel like I’ve regained a bit of that in the last few years but there was a period of my life in which I had a very low opinion of people in general.