James McAvoy

Background

James McAvoy was born on April 21, 1979, in Glasgow, Scotland, to bus driver James and nurse Elizabeth McAvoy. After his parents divorced when he was 11, he was raised by his maternal grandparents in a housing estate in Drumchapel, Glasgow. He went to St. Thomas Aquinas Secondary School in Jordanhill, where he did well enough to form a small school band with a few friends. McAvoy considered becoming a Catholic priest as a child, but when he was 16, actor David Hayman paid a visit to his school and piqued his interest in acting.

Despite enjoying his role in Hayman’s 1995 film “The Near Room,” McAvoy did not seriously consider acting as a vocation, but he did continue to perform as a member of PACE Youth Theater. Instead, he enlisted in the Royal Navy and was accepted before being admitted to the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (R.S.A.M.D.). After graduating in 2000, he accepted a position at the R.S.A.M.D. (now the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland) and relocated to London. He had already made a few television appearances at this point and proceeded to work steadily in television and movies until 2004 when he first caught the attention of the British public as car thief Steve McBride in the popular U.K. television series “Shameless,” and then the rest of the world as Mr. Tumnus in Disney’s adaptation of C. S. Lewis’s “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” (2005).

McAvoy made his breakthrough in the film “Atonement” (2007). Since then, McAvoy has branched out into theater, starring in Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” for which he was nominated for an Olivier Award for ‘Best Actor.’ In January 2015, McAvoy returned to Trafalgar Studios to play Jack Gurney, the insane 14th Earl of Gurney who believes he is Jesus, in the first revival of Peter Barnes’ comedy “The Ruling Class,” for which he received the London Evening Standard Theater Awards ‘Best Actor.’ McAvoy has starred in several films over the years. In the psychological thriller “Split” (2016), he played Kevin Wendell Crumb, a man suffering from severe dissociative identity disorder, and reprised the role in the sequel, “Glass” (2019).

He also played Bill Denbrough in “It: Chapter Two” (2019), the horror sequel to “It” (2017). McAvoy began dating Anne-Marie Duff, who played his love interest in the film “Shameless.” They were married on November 11, 2006, and Brendan, their son, was born in 2010. However, the couple announced their divorce on May 13, 2016, in a joint statement. In an interview with “The Guardian,” the actor confessed that he married Lisa Liberati discreetly. The couple met on the set of M. Night Shyamalan’s horror film “Split” in 2016, where Liberati was working as the director’s assistant.