by Louise Ford
Lorna made good use of the time she had left and decided that there were areas in her life that needed closure, which in turn brought some truly happy and cherished moments for Jamie. Having been adopted at birth, she decided to track down her biological parents and in doing so discovered that she had a sister. There was much to be celebrated and Jamie, along with the rest of the Dornan clan, was delighted to see his mum enjoy some very special days in her final months. ‘My wife did look for her parents, we knew the doctor who delivered her and he helped her. But she did find them just shortly before her sad demise at the age of fifty and that was a wonderful experience,’ Jamie’s father said. ‘She has a sister and she did keep in contact with her too.’
Lorna also turned to religion and was baptised. Although Jamie didn’t share her beliefs, he understood why she felt comforted in turning to God. ‘I struggle with the whole religious idea myself,’ he told the Evening Standard newspaper, ‘but my mother found faith again when she was dying and I totally respect that.’
In that time she also wrote a booklet which was to be handed out at her funeral; this helped her – and in turn her loved ones – come to terms with her death.
Lorna died the day after Liesa’s twenty-first birthday, a year-and-a-half after her diagnosis. Despite witnessing his mother’s slow demise, it still came as a shock to Jamie. The reality of living without a mother, who had been a devoted parent right to the end even when facing her own mortality, was heartbreaking. ‘There’s no easy time to lose a parent but it’s a very transitional time being that age and a very impressionable time. It was horrific,’ he told the Daily Telegraph. ‘Going through that certainly has had an effect on the darker side of my psyche. I was sixteen …’
The experience was so frightening that Jamie could often draw on the still-raw feelings if an acting role required it. ‘I’m not saying that experiencing loss is why I can cope with darker worlds, I’m not saying that for a second, but I think it opens up a side of you in terms of work that wouldn’t be as accessible had that stuff not happened,’ he explained.
Such overwhelming grief, particularly when his teenage friends couldn’t relate to his life-changing experience, was hard. The sensitive teenager needed an outlet and confided his innermost thoughts to a diary, trying to make sense of what had happened.
Soon after suffering such a huge loss, Jamie had to go through another major upheaval, as he was sent to board for his final two years at school. It meant swapping the confines of his once happy family home, with all the memories of his mother around him, for communal living with his classmates. ‘We felt that it would be better for me, I guess,’ he remembered years later.
Worse still, and in a move that would be challenging for any child to accept, less than a year after his mum’s death, his father had fallen in love again. A doctor pal had set Jim up with a beautiful trainee obstetrician from Pakistan called Samina. Despite there being a considerable age gap of ‘about two decades’, the couple fell deeply in love. ‘I met Samina through a gynaecologist friend and he knew Lorna very well and he knew us all very well. He had a young registrar and he knew that I’d quite like to meet her,’ Jim recalled. He described the events further: ‘I was giving a lecture in Dublin and he sent her along to the conference and she came up to speak to me afterwards. It was pretty instant, for me anyway, because she is beautiful but she’s also very witty, very humorous and it was her sense of humour that made me fall in love with her. I fell for her, I wooed her, I drove all the way down to Limerick to take her out for dinner.’
It was clear that his father had fallen hard for this younger woman and it wasn’t long before Jamie and his sisters were being introduced to the new lady in his life. Although they – and their mother – always knew that Jim would move on after his wife’s death, the three siblings initially struggled to accept the pretty medic into the fold. ‘My kids have been great, though no one would say it was easy at the start,’ Jim said some years later. ‘They knew it was going to happen – they just did not know when it would happen and who it would be.
‘But Samina and they do get on and, with hard work on all sides, we have got to the situation we are in now. Samina would be more of a friend to the girls and perhaps takes more of a maternal role with Jamie.’
Jamie’s acceptance of Samina into their family, while undeniably tricky to begin with, was worth it in the long run, as marriage followed just two years later. Jim had found a new lease of life and it was a relief for his children to see their father happy again. Samina brought laughter and fun into the luxurious house in Cultra, in County Down, that had once been home to Lorna and Jim. Stepmother Samina even oversaw a revamp of the family home a few years later, a true testament to Jamie and his sisters’ fondness for the new woman in their lives. ‘The house had, as all houses do after a couple of decades, got a bit tired,’ explained Professor Dornan in 2005 to the Belfast Telegraph. ‘I’d already started to change it and now, under Samina’s influence, it has been dramatically changed.’
It was clearly a relationship founded on deep understanding and kindness, and Samina insisted that there were no off-limit topics of conversations – their late mother would never be forgotten. ‘I do talk to Samina about Lorna and, of course, many in our circle of friends knew Lorna and mention her, too,’ Jim explained, adding, ‘Samina doesn’t mind that at all.’
While Lorna lived on in their memories and conversations, sixteen-year-old Jamie still felt his mum’s absence keenly. As anyone who has experienced a bereavement will know, the overwhelming feelings of loss can grab you at any time, but as the months passed and grief was slowly replaced with hope, Jamie started to find enjoyment in life again. However, just as he was regaining strength, overwhelming tragedy struck once again.
One year and two weeks after the death of his mother, in August 1999, a group of his friends were killed in a car crash. Like Jamie, all four boys had been keen sportsmen and they had all played together in various rugby and hockey teams at Methodist College. The four pals had excitedly left school on a Friday afternoon for a weekend break at one of the boys’ holiday homes across the border in Ireland. Sadly, not long into the trip, their Vaxuhall Nova was involved in a head-on collision, spinning out of control and killing three of them instantly. Tragically, the fourth boy, seventeen-year-old Chris Hanna, was alive at the scene but died later in hospital in nearby Letterkenny.
As their devastated parents were called in to identify their bodies, it emerged that the other car involved in the crash contained two sisters and their five children, one of whom – a nine-year-old boy – later passed away.
Jamie along with his fellow pupils at Methody were collected together and told the horrendous news about their classmates. The headteacher Wilfred Mulryne told the press at the time that everybody within the highly regarded school was in mourning, adding, ‘It’s unbelievable to imagine four boys losing their lives in this way.’
‘It was a totally hideous life-changing circumstance once again that you carry every day I guess and that’s not going to change,’ Jamie described. ‘These are events that form your identity, I think. Probably nothing too positive, I think it’s changed my view on mortality and death.’
The news hit Jamie particularly hard, since he suddenly found himself grieving for five people; also, such a sudden and tragic loss would have undeniably stirred up still-raw feelings about his mum. He couldn’t cope. Those around him were worried about his state of mind and he was given a counsellor to try and work through his emotions. Jamie is not ashamed to admit that he couldn’t have struggled through his remaining few years at school without therapy and, looking back, he now realises that he was in a very bad way psychologically. Rereading his journals of the time, it was clear he had some very dark and disturbing thoughts. ‘I don’t keep a diary anymore,’ he admitted a few years later, ‘because I used to scare myself when I reread it. You just learn stuff about yourself that maybe you don’t really need to know.’
Even after
years of counselling, he is confused about the impact such major and traumatic events had on shaping his personality. On the one hand, they gave Jamie perspective, making him more able to deal with difficult situations. Losing out on a fashion contract would have been disappointing, for instance, but he could recognise that it wasn’t a matter of life or death. He was well aware that his existence was precious and petty things weren’t worth getting stressed about.
On the other hand, Jamie felt that it was a trauma that he could have done without at such an extremely vulnerable age, particularly since many of his friends seemed to escape such misery during their teenage years. ‘I had a terrible time when I was sixteen, seventeen. Therapy got me through that – I’m not sure how I would have coped without it. It’s awful to say this but it’s almost better that I went through this early on because it prepared me for situations that might arise in later life […] actually I don’t know that it did. It’s just some s**t happened.’
Good friends also helped with his recovery, as did music, which had become a big part of his life. Jamie was an accomplished guitarist and he found that losing himself in songwriting helped him through some very dark days.
He also formed a close bond with school pal David Alexander, who not only shared his passion for music but had lost a parent too, in his second year of sixth form. David’s father had died when he was seventeen, and the two boys found rifling through his record collection – which included albums by Bob Dylan, Buddy Holly and the Rolling Stones – not just therapeutic but also influential in singing and writing songs together.
The pair spent hours composing in their bedrooms and, once they had a few tracks down, they recorded them onto a CD. Enthused with their hard work, the music-loving pair decided to become a two-piece band officially, calling themselves Sons of Jim – after their fathers, who shared the same name. ‘Dave and I went to school together and became quite friendly in the sixth year. We shared a lot of the same musical interests. We recorded some stuff together back in Ireland just to put on CD really,’ Jamie said. As well as singing and playing the guitar Jamie also played the harmonica, which helped to shape their folk band sound.
‘[Having both lost a parent] it’s helpful in our song writing,’ David said of their mutual understanding and shared moments of grief. ‘The two of us have come up on the same street. I think we can talk about it to each other and we know what the other one is getting at when certain emotions or things are put down in songs.’
Nights out with his friends, many of whom ended up being lawyers or barristers, ‘not that you’d ever know it’, also helped with the healing process. And so did Sunday lunches back home with Liesa and Jessica, who were making great strides towards their future careers as marketing director of Ulster Linens and fashion designer at Diesel Ireland respectively.
Therapy also came in the guise of exercise for Jamie, as his hours of rugby and football training also started to have a positive effect on his body. The toned physique, which was later to be adored by millions of women the world over, started to emerge and Jamie began to develop into an extremely handsome young man. Much to his relief, he was no longer the small, baby-faced boy in his class. ‘Because I used to play a lot of sport I’ve always been in decent enough shape. When I used to get asked to do a bit of body work before a photo shoot I’d lie and say, “Yeah, I’m going to the gym” but I literally never did anything,’ Jamie confessed once, when discussing his muscular frame.
Even though competitive sports kept him looking well-defined, Jamie continued to be disappointed with his appearance until he was old enough to grow a beard. As soon as hormones permitted it, he grew as much facial hair as possible and felt comfortable in his skin for the first time in his life. For starters it hid his youthful features and meant that he was less likely to be referred to as ‘cute’ by women.
While it had ‘dangerously bushy ambitions’ according to the star, Jamie kept his beard neatly groomed and in later years admitted that when acting required him to shave it off, he became ‘seriously humpy’. ‘I think photographers and directors realise that my face doesn’t quite work without a beard. I look too young to sell clothes, too young to be a dad. Too young for anything […] I’m still fighting the cute thing. I’m definitely not happy without a beard,’ he said.
While many teenage boys will identify with young Jamie’s obsession with growing facial hair, even as a grown man in his twenties, the model was often gripped by bouts of beard envy. In one instance the young model was mesmerised by the facial forest of a commuter on London’s Underground. ‘This man’s beard was massive,’ he remembered, ‘and I was just staring at it, I loved how it owned his face.’
With all these teenage hormones flying around, and the stress of losing his mother and a group of good friends, Jamie would have been forgiven for flunking out of school. However, against the odds and despite an incredibly disruptive couple of years, he left Methodist College with three A levels in Classics, English and History of Art. Much to his father’s delight, Jamie also won a place at Teesside University to study marketing. It certainly wasn’t going to take him to Hollywood but, as he was not exactly sure what path to take at that point in his life, the three-year course seemed as good an option as any.
Jamie had measured his family ties against a desire to leave Belfast from an early age, and it was time to go. He adored the city and everything it had to offer: culture, art galleries, museums, bars, music venues. Undoubtedly, for a boy like him who was seemingly interested in everything, it was a haven. ‘It’s a brilliant place, with brilliant people. We have our problems but it’s a tiny percentage. There’s a real sense of fun, a real good-naturedness – people don’t take themselves too seriously. I try not to take myself too seriously.’
Going to university would also provide him with the chance to leave the comfortable environs of home to build his own life and meet new friends who knew nothing of his past, which seemed appealing – and he felt more than ready for that.
However, on arriving at Teeside, in Middlesbrough, it quickly became clear that he’d made a terrible mistake. ‘Obviously his life has been coloured by the deaths of his mother and his friends and I think it has left him with a great sense of comradeship,’ his father explained. ‘All of it has made him very thoughtful about life in general and about what he wants to do.’
Whether he’d been derailed by recent events or he realised that a career in marketing wasn’t for him, Jamie pulled himself out of university before the academic year was out and returned to Holywood to review his options.
Not wanting to rest on his laurels and desperate to stay in shape, Jamie continued playing rugby and it was then that he was picked up by the Belfast Harlequins – a dream come true. Being a star player for his home city’s team was exactly what Jamie had long aspired to and everything seemed to be falling into place.
Not long after that though, in 2001, his older sister Liesa noticed an unusual advert in the local paper. Jamie’s two sisters had long been adamant that their younger brother possessed all the good looks of any catwalk model so when they saw that Channel 4’s Model Behaviour show was holding auditions in Belfast, they encouraged him to try it out.
Produced by Princess Productions, the show was similar in format to ITV1’s Popstars; it followed the fortunes of several hopefuls as they lived together and battled it out for the top prize: a modelling contract with top agency Select. ‘I wasn’t too keen, to be honest. It wasn’t something I wanted to do,’ Jamie admitted to the Sunday Times. ‘Back then I was playing a lot of rugby, I was a bit of a lad. Male modelling didn’t really seem like the next step.’
Not wanting to go to the auditions alone, Jamie managed to persuade a friend to accompany him and so the pair joined the queue of hundreds of wannabe models desperate for a taste of fame. The duo were interviewed by the TV team and sent home to wait for a phone call which would let them know whether they had been successful enough to star on the show.
Incredibly,
despite his rugged good looks and Irish charm, Jamie hadn’t been picked. ‘We didn’t get asked back the next day,’ he said. ‘I was on my own from there, and it worked quite well actually.’
Although the TV executives weren’t exactly enamoured with the blue-eyed boy, scouts from the modelling agency, Select, did notice him and told the handsome twenty-year-old to get in touch. Jamie was at a crossroads: he had dropped out of uni, desperately wanting to be an actor and while male modelling was an option, it was an unlikely one. One thing was for certain, though: being holed up in the small town of Holywood in Northern Ireland wasn’t going to contribute anything towards making it big in America’s Hollywood.
His stepmother Samina noticed his ambitious streak and encouraged Jamie to go to London to seek his fortune – he was sold. One plane ride to Stansted and two train journeys later, the good-looking, well-honed youngster arrived in the capital with a bit of cash in his bank account and a vague plan of going to drama school before wangling himself some TV or theatre roles. There was also the back-up option of being a catwalk model if the acting didn’t work out. ‘I loved the fact that acting didn’t involve getting up at seven in the morning, getting a train with a million other people, going to sit at a desk and clocking off at 5:30 pm. When I was younger I thought maybe one day I’d be involved in sport in terms of career. I was also involved in youth theatre. Then as you get a bit older and have to make decisions about roughly where you want to be and what you want to be doing, it just kind of happened,’ Jamie said some years later of his acting career.
Truth to be told, though, it didn’t really just happen like that and his rise to fame was not as easy as the then established star made out. Jamie would have to endure poverty-stricken living quarters, nights sobbing in the pub and the thankless task of working as a barman before getting a hint of the good times he had dreamed of – oh, and with a little help from his dad along the way.