Jamie Dornan Biography

Jamie Dornan is the Northern Ireland actor who played the romantic lead in the 2015 movie version of E.L. James‘s Fifty Shades of Grey.

Dornan grew up outside of Belfast and, after briefly attending Teesside University, went to London to make his way as an actor.

His first recognition came as a model, often shirtless for Calvin Klein, Dior and Armani, among others.

He broke into the movies in 2006, with an appearance in the Sofia Coppola movie Marie Antoinette, but his acting career didn’t get jump-started until 2011, when he started his first of two seasons in the American fantasy series Once Upon a Time.

He returned to the U.K. for a role in the mini-series New Worlds (2014), then received even more exposure with the BBC series The Fall, in which he played a a killer matching wits with detective Gillian Anderson. The role earned Dornan a BAFTA nomination for best actor.

Dornan’s other appearances include the mini-series Death and Nightingales (2018), and the feature films Fifty Shades Darker (2017), Fifty Shades Freed (2018), Anthropoid (2016, with Cillian Murphy), and A Private War (2018, starring Rosemund Pike).