Born:27 May 1971
Place of Birth:London, England
Height:6' 3"
Awards:1 BAFTA nomination
Come the end of 2003, much fuss was being made of the new breed of Brit actors. Thanks to The Lord Of The Rings trilogy, Orlando Bloom was being feted as the next Hollywood face, alongside Keira Knightley, much in demand after Bend It Like Beckham and Pirates Of The Caribbean. Long live the new flesh, as they say. Indeed, so young, so beautiful were these two that the media were blinded to the inexorable rise of another richly talented individual, Paul Bettany. Having broken into headline roles with Gangster Number One, he'd quietly proceeded through a series of art films and classy low-budget dramas while raising his profile with slots beside Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind and Master And Commander. Suddenly, there he was, a star. And, other than the fact that he'd married Jennifer Connelly, no one knew anything about him.
When he's been written about at all, the stage background of Bettany's family is usually dragged up, as if to suggest that conferred upon young Paul some privileged grounding in the performing arts. Paul Bettany himself has occasionally seemed miffed that people might think he benefited from hailing from acting stock. The background is certainly there. Bettany's maternal grandmother, the daughter of a Nottinghamshire pub landlady, moved to the States in the Thirties, where she married a pianist (later a promoter) and enjoyed a career in musical theatre. Her daughter, Paul's mother Anne Kettle, would be a singer, too, as well as a secretary, and would marry an actor, one Thane Bettany, a former ballet dancer (he actually danced with Margot Fonteyn) who'd served in the Royal Navy (he'd secretly practised his dance routines on the ship's warheads during night duty) before joining an avant garde theatre group. Thane had also appeared at the pre-RSC Stratford Festivals between 1956 and 1958, alongside such luminaries as Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh and Ian Holm, featuring in John Gielgud's The Tempest and Michael Redgrave's Hamlet. Interestingly, he's also the godfather of Sophie Rhys-Jones, Countess of Wessex. Way back, the Bettanys had got to know the Rhys-Joneses when both families were living in Northern Borneo. Thane's widowed father would marry Pat Rhys-Jones, so Thane became step-brother to Chris Rhys-Jones, Sophie's father. Unusually, having divorced wife Anne in 1993, he'd later move in with new partner Andy Little.
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