by Louise Ford
‘While he was doing his finals we supported KT Tunstall. Things started to take off a bit and now we’ve released a single.’
On the back of it, the folk duo were starting to perform at a number of prominent acoustic venues across London and reviews were beginning to come in thick and fast. ‘While the pair admire the post-punk and ska influences of English bands such as the Kooks, they have eschewed this achingly hip path,’ one critic raved after hearing the track. ‘Instead, Dornan’s confident voice anchors a traditional-rock sound reminiscent of Counting Crows. Their lyrics, meanwhile, are more romantic and fey than say the spikiness of the Arctic Monkeys.’
However, it was at a showcase in May 2006 that one of Jamie’s songs, ‘Only On The Outside’, was picked out by critics for looking like it was describing his relationship breakdown to Keira. It therefore became clear to Jamie that no matter how hard he tried to distance himself, it was going to be near on impossible to shrug off the interest and intrusion that his ex-girlfriend generated.
The run-up to the show at London’s Teatro club had indeed been tough for Jamie, as Keira had found new love in the preceding few months with her Pride and Prejudice co-star Rupert Friend. While she – the glittering film star who was set to earn £50 million within the next two years – was appearing arm in arm with handsome Friend at the Oscars, Jamie had been performing to a modest crowd in an upstairs room in London’s private members club The Cobden. It was yet another reminder of the discrepancy in their status.
In this latest track, ‘Only On The Outside’, Jamie sang, ‘I can see your fancy friends trying to steal your innocence/you’re so weak around them.’ He reportedly told The Mirror afterwards, ‘The song hurts so much when I sing it. It’s about the difficult times in a relationship. We were so in love.’ Prominent articles in the press followed, claiming that Dornan’s ‘song for Keira’ was about his ‘heartbreak’ for the pretty star.
Exasperated, he decided to publicly dismiss the stories as false. Jamie was not one for speaking officially to newspapers, choosing instead to keep his life as private as possible, but this time he wanted to set the record straight. ‘Considering Dave and I write together, I can’t work out how it could be true,’ he said. ‘People read into the lyrics what they want, I have no control over that I’m afraid. It wasn’t difficult to sing because it was about Keira. I just meant that because it’s so high I found it difficult to reach the notes!’
Jamie and David were at that point laying down tracks in the studio for a debut album under the guidance of Cliff Jones, the frontman of the 1990s pop act Gay Dad. Keira was still on Jamie’s radar in that they met occasionally as friends, but dinners out with her were few and far between because of the actress’s busy schedule and her inability to meet in public places due to unwanted press attention.
The rawness of their split was also starting to fade and far from being emotionally ruined by their parting, as the press continued to claim, Jamie was no longer pining for Keira. His single status was more the result of being ‘useless’ with women rather than despair for his lost love. ‘Ever since I split with her there have been reports that I’m heartbroken. Do I look heartbroken? Of course I’m not. I’m single now and very happy. But that’s not to say there’s no time for romance!’
Although Jamie wasn’t dating anyone officially, he continued to flirt with the world of celebrity and the handsome model flew to Cannes in May 2006 to publicise Marie Antoinette with the rest of the cast and crew. Amongst the champagne parties and soirées aboard million-pound yachts, there was also the all-important debut screening of the film at the French film festival.
Despite his overwhelmingly positive experience on set, to his dismay the movie got booed during its showing to an audience of critics, writers and filmgoers who didn’t like Hollywood’s treatment of the life of the Austrian-born queen. At a press conference afterwards, Coppola – who had previously directed box office smash Lost In Translation – admitted that she too was ‘disappointed’. ‘It’s better to get a reaction, it’s better than a mediocre response. Hopefully some people will enjoy it. I think it’s not for everybody,’ she added.
Insiders hoped that its much younger target audience would make the movie a success in the long run and Jamie was determined to see the positives in the disappointing situation. Whether the historical comedy-drama was going to be a flop or not, it had at least got the model noticed … and that was something Jamie was actually getting rather good at.
Along with making strides in his music career, Jamie had recently landed a massive contract as the face of Dior Homme. The offer was incredible: for three days’ work in Buenos Aires, he was paid – up front – for a three-year exclusivity deal. Although he wasn’t exactly propelled into Keira’s financial stratosphere, this made him an extremely wealthy young man. ‘They pay you well upfront, so it looks like you’re working a lot harder than you are,’ he admitted.
Jamie knew he was onto a good thing and while he had somehow landed a semblance of an acting career with no formal training whatsoever, some of the world’s top designers were also scrabbling to hire him, which was no mean feat, as competition for such major contracts was fierce.
The casting with Dior designer Hedi Slimane at the helm had resembled elements of the reality TV show Model Behaviour for which Jamie had auditioned five years previously, with hopefuls getting eliminated in stages until the judges are left with just two finalists. Although Jamie had failed to make the final cut in the TV version, in the real world he came away with first prize.
His brooding good looks had secured him the enviable contract as the face of the fashion house’s much-hyped fragrance campaign for Dior Homme and once again, he was perplexed that he’d been handed such a prestigious role. ‘Why am I the face of Dior Homme?’ he said in an interview at the time. ‘At Dior, they kept eliminating people until it was down to two. I wasn’t really focused on it at the time, you know. I don’t really know why Hedi chose me. I’m not the best-looking guy around.’
Reflecting Jamie’s nonchalant attitude to the casting, the photos featured the striking model posing effortlessly alongside the aftershave, in a crisp white shirt and black jacket. It was a print campaign with snaps appearing in glossy magazines, newspapers, billboards and bus stops … Jamie’s face was starting to pop up everywhere, all over the world. ‘It was effective casting, and it got people’s attention,’ David Farber, style director at Men’s Vogue magazine, said. ‘Clearly he wasn’t the typical model. He read rather like a “real” person but he obviously wasn’t some skinny waify model boy they found on the street.’ Another admirer drooled, ‘He has the square-jawed profile of a Roman senator.’
The six-figure contract also meant that he reportedly had enough cash to buy into the two-bedroom home he shared with his father in Notting Hill – and Keira was replaced with another new love: a 1988 silver convertible Mercedes-Benz called Maisie.
Jamie was well aware that his success was due to the fact that he photographed like a dream, and he was quite clearly happy to run with it until something else cropped up. It required little effort and, despite being baffled as to how, he was quickly travelling down the path towards becoming the highest-paid male model in the world. Landing a fragrance campaign like Dior Homme is the holy grail for models, with adverts running for months at a time as do the residuals, meaning that Jamie was now earning serious money. ‘It’s a great business for now, a great way to make money and have a laugh. Who knows what’s next?’ he said shortly after the Dior campaign. ‘I put a lot of what’s happened so far to luck and right place, right time.’
Although he hated the hours of sitting around in his underwear getting bored, he loved meeting the outlandish creative types inside the fashion industry; also, it was a business so lucrative for him that it would have been mad to have given it up to go to drama school as he’d originally intended.
Despite the healthy cash flow and stunning good looks, Jamie knew he wasn’t perfect and one of his
massive and unmistakable flaws was being a complete disaster on the runway. Even though he could pose and preen for hours in a studio, Jamie was still useless on a catwalk. Dior was one of the first fashion houses to discover his bouncy gait and, in order to avoid embarrassment for all concerned, quickly amended his contract so that he didn’t have to appear on the catwalk when opening their shows. ‘I got everything out of the world that you can get. And I never did a fashion show,’ he said proudly. ‘It was part of my Dior contract to open its show in Milan […] but we had that written out as I have a funny, bouncy walk – not cool. It wouldn’t make a suit look any better.’
While his modelling career was ticking over nicely, his so-called ‘acting career’ was in fact proving to be something of a flash in the pan. Firstly, Marie Antoinette was not as successful as everyone had hoped. The initial reviews were mixed. American film critic Roger Ebert gave the film four stars out of four, whereas website Rotten Tomatoes scored it 55 per cent in positive reviews, describing it as: ‘Lavish imagery and a daring soundtrack set this film apart from most period dramas; in fact, style completely takes precedence over plot and character development in Coppola’s vision of the doomed queen.’
However, People magazine’s movie critic, Leah Rozen, was quick to pan the film and wrote in her wrap-up of the 2006 Cannes Film Festival: ‘The absence of political context upset most critics of Marie Antoinette, director Sofia Coppola’s featherweight follow-up to Lost in Translation.
‘Her historical biopic plays like a pop video, with Kirsten Dunst as the doomed eighteenth-century French queen acting like a teenage flibbertigibbet intent on being the leader of the cool kids’ club.’
The film grossed $15 million in Northern America and $61 million worldwide, making it one of the few underperformers for distributor Columbia that year. In the UK, the movie took only $1,727,858 in box-office sales. It wasn’t the best news for Jamie but, undeterred by the film’s flop, his agent had lined him up for numerous auditions – all of which, to Jamie’s embarrassment, failed. ‘I mean f***ing hundreds of auditions,’ he said. ‘Some of them totally humiliating experiences. People attach too much to the idea of being a model that you can only be a certain way to have done it. You will always be dealing with it.
‘You’re an actor who used to be a model, who never trained; there are not many directors queuing up.’
For the time being, though, he had aspirations of being a rock star which helped to keep him positive. ‘It’s fun being able to play your music and people listening to it and responding well. You get a real buzz. I think there is part of me that does want to lift off and go a bit more Chris Martin, jumping around the place.’
The night before his homecoming gig in Belfast’s Auntie Annie’s club, Jamie admitted he was set on concentrating on one thing at a time. ‘When I’m doing my music, I put my all into it and when I’m doing my modelling or acting, I do the same. At the moment I’m really busy with the band so I put everything into it.
‘I see them all as different things. They’re three different jobs, I work really hard on all of them and I can make it all work, I believe, to a credible extent, if I’m willing to put the work in.
‘Someone told me they thought I would land on my feet and I probably believed them too much. But from that point I stopped worrying about everything.’
As it turned out, though, Jamie had plenty to worry about – and this time it wasn’t Keira. It was his beloved dad. Behind the scenes, his whole world had turned upside down again.
Chapter Seven
THE BIG ‘C’ STRIKES AGAIN
Jamie’s father had cancer. It was a devastating blow to the Dornan family and it hit his three children hard. He certainly didn’t seem particularly ill but the truth was that he was very sick indeed. To all those who knew him it seemed impossible. How could such a strong and energetic man – at just fifty-seven years of age – be struck down with the same disease that had taken Jamie’s mother just seven years before?
Professor Dornan had been a real guiding strength throughout his children’s difficult childhood years, and it was both cruel and inconceivable that someone so crucial and present in their lives now faced his own mortality. After all, he was Northern Ireland’s most successful obstetrician, drove a sports car, was happily remarried, went to the gym twice a week and played golf. ‘Professor Jim Dornan, the colourful Obstetrician Gynaecologist, with an insatiable zest for life,’ one journalist wrote by way of introducing the famous doctor in an interview on his incredible forty-year career in medicine, during which he delivered 6,000 babies.
Ever since the death of his first wife Lorna to pancreatic cancer when Jamie was just sixteen, there was no doubt the Dornans, as a family, made a point of seizing the moment. Despite his troubled teenage years, Jamie had somehow found the strength to push ahead with life, determined to grab whatever good opportunities came his way – a positive attitude which was undeniably due to the example set by his father.
However, life had changed again and abruptly at a time when Jamie was at his most vulnerable. His father broke the news just as Jamie was coming to terms with a life without Keira. ‘My dad is one of Northern Ireland’s top obstetricians. He’s been ill with leukaemia for a while,’ Jamie admitted in 2006 in the wake of becoming single again. ‘Despite all the treatment he still isn’t in remission. Dad’s an amazing guy. My mum Lorna died from cancer of the pancreas when I was only sixteen. She had been ill for about a year-and-a-half. Afterwards Dad helped me pull through the grief. He is the strongest person I’ve ever met.’
Rather unusually, Professor Dornan had discovered the cancer himself. He made the self-diagnosis while staying at the luxury flat in London that he co-owned with Jamie, while on a business trip to the capital. The busy doctor regularly jetted over from his home in Belfast to meet with colleagues at the Royal College of Midwives, and the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, where he was vice-president at the time. It was on a short walk home from the Marylebone institute one evening when he realised just how ‘utterly and totally’ exhausted he had become.
When he got indoors, and with Jamie out for the night with friends, Jim had some rare time to himself and he started a train of thought, which was to bring devastating results. ‘I did think anything could happen to anybody. It did come as a very great shock though to some of my friends that I did actually make the diagnosis myself.
‘I was in London at the time, at the Royal College, Jamie and I owned a flat and he was out one night and I was just so tired walking up past the college, I was just knackered.’
In reality, he had known that something hadn’t been right for some time; first of all, just looking at himself in the mirror he could see that the man in the reflection was clearly anaemic. The signs for anaemia – meaning someone has low iron levels in their blood – include a pale complexion and breathlessness or tiredness due to low oxygen levels.
All the key symptoms were there; however, nothing in his lifestyle had warranted them being there. He ate very well – Jim himself admitted he was a dab hand in the kitchen, just like his son Jamie – exercised moderately and wasn’t bleeding. Nevertheless, the father-of-three was also overwhelmingly tired; thus far he had put it down to being overworked and stressed. He was approaching retirement age, after all, and had a jam-packed life both in and outside of work, which was showing no sign of slowing down. ‘Just before my own diagnosis was made I was simply completely exhausted. Using the good ol’ never failing, retrospectroscope, I had taken on a lot while giving up nothing. Pressure and stress. How often do you hear those words?’ he explained.
As he finally took time to stop and think about it, though, he realised that being both anaemic and so fatigued were also key signs of cancer. He became certain that he had some variety of leukaemia; his symptoms pointed to the probability that a problem in his bone marrow had triggered the anaemia, since he could rule out the more common and less serious causes for the blood disorder.
He vowed to go for a blood test as soon as he returned to Belfast the following day. The journey back to Northern Ireland and the twenty-four hours that followed, during which he underwent a string of medical tests, were without a doubt harrowing for Jamie’s father. Worse still, the results confirmed exactly what he had suspected. ‘For twenty-four hours I knew it and then I got the confirmation,’ he said.
Hearing those words for the first time when sitting on the other side of the doctor’s table was deeply frightening for the father-of-three. ‘The words Cancer and Leukaemia weren’t new to me when I heard them directed to me personally for the first time, but I do admit that when they come right to your front door you soon realise you can’t run out the back one,’ Professor Dornan said almost a decade later. ‘I was terribly fearful.’
Having delivered babies for over thirty years, Jim was used to experiencing extreme emotions – from the wonders of seeing a healthy child come into the world to the devastation of delivering a stillborn – but nothing prepared him for the moment he was told he had cancer and stared his own mortality in the face.
He had also seen his much-loved first wife and cherished father die from the cruel disease, and now it was his turn to sit in the patient’s chair. He knew more than anyone how this could all turn out – as did Jamie – and the thought of losing both parents to the disease was without a doubt terrifying. ‘My day-to-day work as an obstetrician brought me daily highs and lows associated with the total pleasure and joy associated with a successful outcome, and the often total sense of loss associated with a tragic outcome to birth.
