Career
Jude Law started acting in 1987 with the National Youth Music Theatre and was immediately very successful, playing various roles in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. His first major stage role was Foxtrot Darling in Philip Ridley's award winning The Fastest Clock In The Universe. He then went on to the West End, playing Michael in Jean Cocteau's tragicomedy Les parents terribles directed by Sean Mathias, which earned him a nomination for an Laurence Olivier Award as Best Newcomer. The play moved on to Broadway, with a title change to Indiscretions, and saw him nominated for a Tony Award and Theatre World Award.
In 1989 he got his first TV role in a movie based on a Beatrix Potter book, The Tailor of Gloucester. After minor roles in British television, including a two-year stint in the Granada TV soap opera Families and the leading role in the BFI /Channel 4 short The Crane, Law had his breakthrough with the British ram-raiding drama Shopping which also featured his future wife Sadie Frost. He shot to fame in Britain upon the release of the biopic Wilde, in which he played Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas, the glamorous lover of Stephen Fry's Oscar Wilde.
He subsequently moved to Hollywood; his performances include Andrew Niccol's Gattaca, as a frustrated Olympic medalist bound by a wheelchair, in Clint Eastwood's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil as the ill-fated lover of Kevin Spacey's character, and in Sam Mendes's Road to Perdition as a sadistic hitman in a critically-praised performance.
He has been nominated for an Academy Award twice; once as Best Supporting Actor for his performance in The Talented Mr. Ripley in 2000, and then again as Best Actor in a Leading Role for Cold Mountain in 2003, both directed by Anthony Minghella. For the film The Talented Mr. Ripley he learned to play saxophone and earned a MTV Movie Award nomination together with Matt Damon and Fiorello for performing the song Tu Vuo' Fa L'Americano by Renato Carosone and Nicola Salerno, so he learned ballet dancing for the film Artificial Intelligence: AI (2001).
He portrayed the title character in Alfie, the remake of Bill Naughton's 1966 drama, playing the role originated by Sir Michael Caine. He took on another of Caine's earlier roles in the 2007 film Sleuth adapted by Nobel Laureate in Literature Harold Pinter, while Caine played the role originated by Sir Laurence Olivier. Law, who fathered the idea and produced the film, is an admirer of Olivier. It was his idea to use the famous actor's image in the 2004 film Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, so that, figuratively speaking, he could act opposite the late actor. "...Fifteen years after his death, Olivier once again received star billing in a movie. Through the use of computer graphics, footage of him as a young man was integrated into the film in which Olivier "played" the villain. ..."
In 2006 he co-starred opposite Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet in the romantic comedy The Holiday.
In 2009 he will appear opposite Forest Whitaker in the dark sci-fi comedy Repossession Mambo, a role which he has said will require greater physicality than normal for him, and will see him in much more muscular shape than previously.
Jude Law is on the Top Ten List from the 2006 A-list of the most bankable movie stars in Hollywood, following the criteria of James Ulmer in The Ulmer Scale.
On March 1, 2007, he was honored with the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres conferred by the French government, in recognition of his contribution to World Cinema Arts. He was named a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres.
In 2009 he will be returning to the London stage to perform the role of Hamlet, in Shakespeare's play Hamlet, under the direction of Kenneth Branagh, at the Donmar Warehouse.
