by Louise Ford
Of course, he had much to draw on his own idyllic upbringing to use as a template for his own family one day. Little Jamie, being the much-loved youngest child of the Dornan brood, was immediately taken under everyone’s wing. His mother taught him to read, so he became an avid bookworm, his two older sisters had a little brother to preen, protect and look after, while his father taught him all that he knew.
As a schoolboy, Jamie enjoyed all the usual pursuits of fishing, riding bikes and building camps, and his love for animals meant that his dream job at primary school was to be a ranger, which over the years grew more eccentric in design. ‘I saw an episode of Lassie where there was a park ranger who drove a golf buggy. I thought it was the coolest thing. A ranger who played golf – that became the dream,’ he told the Mail on Sunday.
Often found with his nose in a book, the youngest Dornan read as many classic childhood novels as he could get his hands on, which he later admitted was hugely influential on his path to adulthood. ‘I recently reread all the classics from my youth, Swallows and Amazons, Tom Sawyer and Peter Pan, because they must have shaped me in an important way, but I wasn’t sure how,’ he commented years later.
It is true that scenes from his early childhood wouldn’t have been out of place in a Hollywood movie, with long summers spent languishing in the back garden enjoying barbeques and games on the lawn, while cold Irish winters saw the family gather for sumptuous and much-loved roast dinners every Sunday afternoon.
When Jamie started school, he immediately showed an aptitude for all disciplines. His family’s past – whether he knew it or not – and their rich and varied skills and natural strengths seemed to manifest themselves in the young schoolboy.
Sport was his life and he was a die-hard Manchester United fan who loved playing football. It also quickly became obvious that he was a dab hand at rugby; thanks to his speed and slight size, Jamie was ideal for a position on the wing.
He also became renowned for his regular trips to fast-food giant McDonald’s to get fuelled up before matches by scoffing burgers. ‘I’ve played on the wing since I was about eight. I’ve always needed to bulk up so until the modelling took off I was ramming Big Macs down my throat,’ he said. ‘I remember Jamie’s Big Mac obsession,’ a former classmate remembered. ‘He was a fantastic sportsman and was the envy of a lot of his peers.’
A privileged set-up also meant that Jamie had the chance to sample more activities than many do in a lifetime; for example, he shared a passion for golf with his father, who enjoyed a weekly game. As his hometown of Holywood boasted the Royal Belfast Golf Club – the oldest in Ireland, dating back to 1881 – it was a logical step for many local residents to try their hand at the game.
As was the case for most sports Jamie undertook, he was a natural. ‘I’ve been into golf since I was about eleven years old and now play to a thirteen handicap. I’ll try anything once – yoga, Pilates, you name it, I’ll give it a whirl and see what I can learn from it.’
No one within the Dornan clan was the least bit surprised by his natural sporting ability; it was in the genes after all, as he clearly took after his paternal grandfather, James. ‘As a friend brought up at my [second] wedding,’ his father Jim explained, ‘my son Jamie was a great rugby player and my father was a great soccer player and it’s amazing how sporting ability can just skip a generation. But I did enjoy rugby.’
When Jamie also showed early signs of wanting to act, those who knew the family’s history once more weren’t at all shocked. One of his first roles was cross-dressing Widow Twanky in his junior school’s end-of-year pantomime. Although not the easiest parts for any young boy, he nonetheless performed exceptionally well. Jamie loved the buzz of being on stage and his teachers were so impressed with the performance that he was presented with his first drama award.
Excited by his success, and like his father decades previously, he suddenly became fascinated to discover that there was a famous actor in the family. His imagination piqued, Jamie decided to write a letter to Greer Garson to let her know that he was following in her well-trodden footsteps.
After contacting various relatives, the Dornans excitedly managed to track down the retired screen star to an address in Dallas, Texas. ‘When you’re a kid, you’re not really watching things like Mrs. Miniver and the original Pride and Prejudice, so I wasn’t really aware of her but I wrote her a letter,’ Jamie said. ‘She was living in Texas and we managed to get her address through the family. I wrote her this letter saying I was playing Widow Twanky in our primary school production – which, may I add, I won the drama prize for.’
Sadly, in April 1996, just after he had posted the letter, they noticed her obituary in the national press. She had died a week earlier from a heart attack in a Texan hospital at the age of ninety-one. ‘But I promise you, that the week before we got the letter sent off it was on the news that she died. So I personally never had any contact with her. But it’s amazing to be connected to her. I love watching her films. She was my grandmother’s first cousin,’ he explained.
Although life in Holywood was good, nearby Belfast was a sometimes frightening place to live. The rich and diverse capital of Northern Ireland, just six miles away, was at the centre of a longstanding sectarian – and violent – conflict between its Catholic and Protestant populations.
At the time of Jamie’s birth, the opposing groups – republicans, whose followers believed all of Ireland should be an independent republic, and loyalists, who wanted to retain their position within the United Kingdom – were deeply involved in what would be a thirty-year conflict known as the Troubles.
Bombing, assassination and street violence formed a backdrop to life in Belfast between 1968 and 1998. At its worst, the Provisional IRA (Irish Republican Army) detonated twenty-two bombs in Belfast city centre in 1972 on what became known as ‘Bloody Friday’, killing eleven people. Loyalist paramilitaries, including the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), claimed that the killings they carried out were in retaliation for the IRA campaign, although most of their victims were Catholics with no links to the terrorist group.
Despite the fact that the Dornans were living in the leafy suburban town of Holywood, the threat of violence still remained a daily reality. Belfast was referred to as the ‘European capital of terrorism’ and although Jamie fortunately had little experience of the violent backlash of the Troubles, he was aware of the risk it posed. ‘I come from Holywood, a lovely part of the city. Growing up there was like, “Let’s go out shopping in Belfast”, “no bomb scare”, “ah right, f*** it”. You got used to it,’ he described.
Although religion played a part in his family’s history, since grandparents on both sides were Methodist lay preachers, Jamie is quick to point out they were Protestants in name only. ‘I’m Protestant but the word couldn’t mean less to me; I just don’t give a …’ he said. Explaining further, he added in another interview, ‘I think people from Northern Ireland have some kind of unspoken general feeling of what it is to be around segregation. You have an awareness of it because you know how much grief it’s caused. It’s a tiny percentage who have ruined it for that country, that just p****s everyone else off.’
In such troubled times, the Dornans’ comfortable home became in more ways than one a sanctuary from the outside world, where family came first. Additionally, Jamie was sheltered from the violence of his surroundings during his secondary education at Belfast’s Methodist College, a grammar school with an esteemed reputation. The co-educational institution founded in 1865 was not only renowned in Northern Ireland for its academic excellence but also for its impressive record of achievement in music, drama and sport. Situated on the south side of Belfast, ‘Methody’ offered a vast array of subjects and activities to its 1,800 pupils, including an incredible choice of sports, such as golf, rowing, judo, kayaking, fencing, squash and swimming.
With all that on offer, the future model thrived, and competitive sports remained his true for
te. Jamie was smart and popular, and the teenager had a close circle of contemporaries who remained friends for life.
Girlfriends, however, were thin on the ground. Against all odds, considering his future as a male supermodel, Jamie was unimpressed by his looks. He was small and slight for his age, and was constantly labelled as ‘cute’ by his older sisters’ friends, which infuriated the rugby-playing teenager.
At the age of sixteen, he was one of the smaller boys in his class and, like his own father, he only reached his full height of six foot when he stopped growing at the age of twenty-one. The teenage years therefore were tough for someone like him, who longed to be seen as manly and sporty. And although his boyish physique didn’t hinder him on the sports pitches, it left him surprisingly and disappointingly lacking in female interest. ‘It’s not like I cleaned up with girls,’ he moaned some years later. ‘I always looked young and I was very small, I hated being cute.’
He was, however, deeply interested in the opposite sex and at the age of twelve he finally managed to experience his first kiss. Sadly, it wasn’t the most romantic of clinches; indeed, just like most people’s first forays into romance, it was quick and not particularly memorable. ‘My first kiss was that classic of behind the bike sheds at school when I was twelve or thirteen years old with a girl I can’t remember,’ he said.
With women out of the question at the time, he ploughed his focus into sport, music and acting. He suffered a few setbacks, and, as he was asthmatic, he had to endure the inconvenience of taking his inhaler with him everywhere he went. However, not even a lung condition could stop Jamie from prospering in competitive sport; he was focused, driven and quicker than many of his contemporaries.
He was a keen athlete who could run exceptionally fast – once recording 100 metres in 11.1 seconds. He also found himself on the rugby, football and cricket teams, and regular sports fixtures and matches meant that his devoted parents would often be seen cheering him on from the sidelines. Despite his father’s busy career, Jim would try hard to make it down to the muddy sports pitch to support his son as often as possible.
However, his sporting achievements weren’t accomplished without a good dose of blood and tears, as he twice ended up in hospital with a broken nose. At fifteen he was accidentally hit in the face with a ball by his tennis coach ‘for cheekiness’, and he ended up in hospital for a second time following a ‘particularly nasty’ rugby collision.
Off pitch, Jamie indulged in the rather gentler pursuit of the dramatic arts, and his enthusiasm for drama was further ignited when he joined local amateur dramatics group the Holywood Players. Run by his dad’s sister, Carole Stewart, Jamie was handed a host of roles, which allowed him to practise and hone his considerable acting skills. ‘I did a lot of stage stuff growing up. My auntie runs an amateur dramatic society back in Belfast so I was doing Chekhov at twelve years old,’ he described. Years later, he also added, ‘I loved acting and I always wanted to go to get my A Levels and go to drama school.’
His father Jim was immensely proud of the family connection and was keen, unlike his own parents, to encourage Jamie to follow his acting dream. ‘My sister should really have been an actor too but in those days my parents didn’t encourage it, so she’s a physiotherapist but also a huge amateur dramatist. I think almost every year her productions make it into the finals of local competitions both in the UK and Ireland and she is just a star.
‘Amateur drama is big in Ireland … what else do you do on a wet winter’s night in Ireland or for that matter on a wet summer’s night in Ireland?!’ he explained.
Jamie was also a rising star in Methodist College’s impressive school productions. ‘He was very modest and one of his best subjects was drama,’ Jamie’s former vice-principal, Norma Gallagher, recalled. ‘I remember him making a very good milkman in Blood Brothers and Baby Face in Bugsy Malone.’ The latter was a role that had clearly been assigned to the pint-sized Jamie because of his young, boyish looks, similar to those of the fresh-faced Hollywood star Dexter Fletcher, who played the part in the famous musical gangster film in 1976.
Life was going extremely well for Jamie; apart from the usual highs and lows of being a teenager, he was happy, secure and doing well at school, with two loving parents who had been there for him every step of the way. But to his horror, everything was set to change suddenly. The comfortable world he had known and cherished for the previous fifteen years was to be seemingly destroyed in one crushing blow when unexpectedly his mother Lorna was diagnosed with terminal cancer.
It was a bitter dose of reality for the young fifteen-year-old to bear, and the eighteen months that followed were to be the most horrendous of his life.
Chapter Two
LOSING A MOTHER
‘My mum was extremely glamorous, beautiful and very into style and fashion,’ Jamie said at the height of his modelling career. ‘Mum would have loved all this. She would have been the proudest.’ Clearly, even years after his devastating loss, Jamie was still reeling from her death; Lorna was a mother who had been, and would have continued to be, fiercely supportive of everything her gifted son did. He missed her deeply.
Indeed, nothing could have prepared the Dornans for the shock of discovering that fifty-year-old Lorna had cancer. It seemed inconceivable that the former nurse, who was young and energetic, and always showed such zest for life, could be all of a sudden struck down with the disease. Just a few days before the terrible news came, Jamie’s parents had returned from a relaxing weekend in Madrid with the Ulster Obstetrics Society. As she didn’t feel well, she decided to go to the doctor, who diagnosed painless jaundice: a condition which manifests itself with a range of symptoms including weight loss, yellowing of the skin and loss of appetite. However, a few days later, following further tests, Lorna was delivered the devastating news that she had pancreatic cancer. And that was not all: the disease was advanced and terminal, meaning that no amount of surgery or chemotherapy could cure her.
Lorna had to face the horrendous fact that she had little more than a year to live. It seemed particularly cruel that the devoted mother-of-three, who had guided her children expertly through their formative years and seen them blossom into well-rounded teenagers, would never get to enjoy witnessing the next steps of their lives: careers, marriage and children of their own.
Jamie, along with his two sisters, Liesa and Jessica, were floored by the news. The wretchedness of the situation was even harder to bear for their father, as his years of medical training were essentially useless in this situation when he needed them the most. There was no cure and nothing that he – or anyone – could do. ‘That was the most frustrating thing – knowing there was nothing that could be done,’ Jim told the Belfast Telegraph. ‘The first three weeks of her illness were incredible – the whole family was totally devastated.’
Once the shock had worn off, like so many families hit by cancer, they had to somehow get on with life. The Dornans had always been a tight-knit unit and now more than ever they had to pull together and face Lorna’s cancer head-on. Jim was straight with the three children and explained that although their mother would die from her illness, they could rely on him for strength and guidance. Friends and family members also rallied round to help, including Jim’s mother, who was on hand to look after Jamie and his two sisters.
‘I initially didn’t cope with my loss of Lorna,’ Jim said. ‘Myself and the kids were just devastated by it, I also had my own father who died of cancer so I had some realisation in my own backyard of what was going to happen.
‘My mother had dealt with it tremendously and she was actually very helpful to me when it came to Lorna but you can’t prepare yourself for that, it was totally and utterly and completely devastating for us all for quite a short period of time.
‘But I’ve always felt I love challenges and I love finding a way around something, and I do say, “Right, we are who we are, now how are we going to deal with this?” With the kids’ help and my helping them and hel
p from the family we managed to deal with it and Lorna was great!’
Ultimately, the only way forward was for everyone to accept her terminal prognosis. Jamie coped by not wasting time waiting for a miracle or hunting for a way of saving her; instead, the young lad spent every free moment savouring the time he had left with his mother.
Although it had been distressing to hear, Jamie was also thankful to his father for telling him the truth, which meant that they could fully focus on being together for her last eighteen months and making every minute count.
Nevertheless, it was a very bleak time in his life and one he doesn’t like to revisit often. ‘It was a bizarre and huge, awful turning point in my life. The comfort was knowing that it was inoperable – knowing what the outcome was going to be rather than clinging on to some kind of hope that she was going to be with us. We had a year and half,’ Jamie recalled.
Incredibly, despite knowing that she didn’t have long to live, Lorna showed unimaginable strength for her children, and managed to stay positive and interested in the people she was going to leave behind. ‘She wasn’t happy all the time or anything but she didn’t make it difficult for us,’ Jim explained. ‘There’s no doubt that everybody has to have hope and the whole family and our friends did have hope but it was hope tinged with a major dose of realism.
‘And, of course, it was important the kids had hope so that whatever time left was positive but I also had to be realistic with them about something that I knew was inevitable.
‘But she was amazing throughout her illness and remained a wonderful mother to the end.’
