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Gertrude · 02-12-2007, 05:13 AM

Hi Tcup4jdh ! I am a newbie here, but am quite a long time OB fan. I also like to talk about Josh coz he’s my sister’s fave actor (I posted at Josh’s forum once about pizza) but am a solid OB fan. Actually, right now there’s nothing to catch up on OB b’coz his career is on a standstill and regarding his personal life, he’s just so devoted to Sidi and being happy with Penelope Cruz (but nothing serious is cooking up between them yet). Rather, you’d love to learn about his past and these interviews/stories will help you to know him better—if you haven’t read them before.

Interviews

From url=(0064)http://www.glam.com/g/p/3000465/5523...0/20/99154282/

Orlando Bloom is undoubtedly one of Hollywood’s finest rising actors, and one of Britain’s sexiest male exports. With over 15 films under his belt, and several more in the works, it was amazing he had time to come and pick up three surfboard awards (for Action-Adventure movie of the summer, Choice Hottie and Choice Rumble) at the 2006 Teen Choice Awards in Universal City, CA. Here's what he had to say....

How does it feel to be a part of such an incredible movie trilogy like
Pirates Of The Caribbean?Great. I have to say it’s great to be a part of a film that kids can really enjoy going to see and respond to, and they seem to really love it. It’s something great for people to enjoy.

Who did you bring with you to the Teen Choice Awards?I have one of my best friends from London here with me tonight actually. He’s never been to anything like this so for him it’s kind of like the real deal. Very exciting, you know?

What was the big highlight of your summer?
Wow! Geez, the highlight of my summer would have to be getting a bit of time off actually! I got about three weeks between filming the 2nd and the 3rd installments of Pirates, so I got to hang out in London with my mom and my friends and my family
Growing up, all kids have chores their parents make them do. What was the worst chore your mom ever made
you do?
You know, my mom used to make me polish the brass and the door knobs and other stuff. I kind of liked it, I don’t know…but now… (laughter)

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?Be true to yourself. To thine own self be true, and that’s a real challenge. It was given to me numerous times in my life by different people like teachers, coaches, professors.

What are you working on after Pirates?I’ve got to tell you that there’s this new film I did in the middle of all these big movies, it’s called Haven and it’s out September 15. It’s from a first time director, a 24-year old kid did it. He shot in the Caribbean again, believe it or not, I seem to not be able to get away from the Caribbean. But there is no sword in it, in this one, but it’s um, I’m really proud of it. It’s a real… It’s a kind of youth culture movie. It’s a sort of Romeo and Juliet, kind of West Side Story broken love story and it’s a good one, you know? So hopefully... that’s out September 15.

From
url=(0063)http://www.elflady.com/orlandolove/p...p?t=6638&pp=40

Orlando Bloom sits chewing banana and peanut butter on toast, having his morning tea on what could be the patio of a modest little house anywhere in the world—watching his coal black mutt ramble around on the grass, chew twigs, and relieve himself. But little things everywhere hint that this is a partly ﬁctional realm. Bloom is swathed in one of the long scarves he favors, covered in trinkets, and wearing combat-weight black boots, but because he has become so extraordinarily well-known for playing epic roles, the overall effect is of a man who is not quite modern but in modern dress. And this is no man’s house but a lavish bungalow at the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood. It’s not even one of the A-list bungalows down on the main level, where John Belushi breathed his last. This one is far more grand—seemingly ﬂoating above the hotel, insulated from the world by heavy gray wooden doors. It even has a private exit so that Bloom can come and go without fear of paparazzi.

The moment he speaks—despite outward appearances—it’s clear that the only thing that isn’t tinged with unreality is Bloom himself, who comes across as impossibly levelheaded. He is ﬁnishing his ﬁrst role as a contemporary American man, a character in the ﬁctional real world, in Cameron Crowe’s new romantic comedy, Elizabethtown. “Being a Brit, I’ve spent most of my time here either in New York or L.A.,” Bloom says, unselfconsciously smacking peanut butter as he speaks. “But during the Elizabethtown shoot, we were staying in the Brown Hotel, a classic, old-school place in Louisville. Going to Kentucky was a whole different side of America I never knew about. It was America. The hats, the suits—they’re not letting go of their traditions. Which is great. I love traditions. I mean, cultural ones.”

In contrast to his sensible demeanor, Bloom is abnormally good-looking. And it’s often hard to bear in mind how young he is—how much work and fame he has gathered up in a scant four years. He is routinely on all the lists: People’s Most Beautiful, the Internet’s Most Downloaded, you name it. But some fairly grim experience has made him play against type in real life. Laconically staring out over the fronds and high hibiscus of the Chateau and eating unripe blueberries, he doesn’t hint at being aware of his Old Hollywood appeal—and he certainly doesn’t come off as ethereal.

There’s nothing otherworldly about the inside of the house, either. It’s a mess, scattered with health food, research, and mementos, much of which is still in boxes, since Bloom has been living here a month during one of his downtimes with Kate Bosworth. In the bedroom is residue from old work: There’s a DVD about the Crusades, ancient homework for Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven. Bloom grins and admits that while it’s ideal to read entire books, DVDs have the appeal of being condensed and visual. “Knowledge is power,” he says—“but having too much can actually get in the way. You simply want to know what world you’re in, and immerse yourself.” He’s taken time to hang a Cool Hand Luke poster, since he reveres Paul Newman. The kitchen is an aftermath of some kind of organic-food explosion. Everywhere you turn, there are protein shakes, containers of carrot and mango juice, oranges, tomatoes, and Lord-knows-what made out of tofu.

“I haven’t gone back to being vegetarian,” Bloom says, surveying the chaos. “I’ve gone back to the process of seeing what foods give me energy. When you’re working and you’re required to switch it on, you need to know what fuels you.”
Even Sidi, the wild black dog, has a prized possession or two in the wilderness of boxes and CDs and photos. Cameron Crowe has awarded the pup with a small framed Elizabethtown poster and signed it, “Try to eat smaller portions.”

Walking out the door, one sees the least artful object in the house: a sign, in ﬁerce block lettering, that reads DO NOT LET THE DOG INSIDE! Sidi is explicitly banished from the house, given his taste for apocalypse. “When I’m not here, he really tears up the place,” Bloom says, as the lone crease in his forehead deepens slightly. “He can be pretty devastating.”

It was the same during the Elizabethtown shoots. Kirsten Dunst marveled at what a tearaway that dog could be, and says Orlando’s trailer had to be “Sidi-proofed.”

“They had to put a sheet of plastic on the ﬂoor!” she says, laughing. “That dog just doesn’t care. And Orlando’s way of unstressing between takes is to jump around like a 5-year-old or ride on a pint-size scooter, whereas I’m more self-critical. He was always playing with Sidi between takes, and Sidi is still in many ways a street dog.” Then again, in many ways, so is Orlando.

Elizabethtown is vintage Cameron Crowe: dead center in the crosshatch between comedy and drama. It opens with Bloom’s character experiencing a professional failure—more accurately, as his character narrates, a ﬁasco—of staggering proportions. A shoe he has designed for an Oregon-based company (clearly modeled after Nike) is such a disaster that it’s being recalled, losing the company $972 million, all of it Bloom’s fault. To magnify Bloom’s self-loathing, the head of the company (played to the hilt by Alec Baldwin) leads him on a daunting walk through the corporate complex, explaining the sheer magnitude of this disaster. At one point, the two gaze onto a vast, NASA-scale ecological laboratory; Baldwin’s character pauses and ruefully observes, “We could have saved the planet.” At another point, laughing out his grief, Baldwin remarks that he has read that Bloom’s shoe “may actually cause an entire generation to return to bare feet.”

Bloom’s character responds by creating an elaborate suicide machine and is on the brink of using it when he learns that his father has died: He must travel to Kentucky to retrieve the body. So begins a chain of events that, as is so often untrue in Hollywood movies, is impossible to predict. Crowe doesn’t deal in cinematic formulas. The ﬁlm is strangely both intimate and sprawling, hitting a lot of giant themes— fathers and sons, life and death, hope and regret—through small, subtle encounters.

It’s striking how easily Bloom ﬁts into regular clothing and the twenty-ﬁrst century after having spent most of his career in chain mail, on horseback, or shouting things like “The Ring must be destroyed!” No ﬁlm actor in memory has been so furiously attached to the epic and fantasy genres as Orlando Bloom. After making his debut as a rent boy in a 1997 ﬁlm about Oscar Wilde, he spent three years at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama—then, right out of the gate, landed the Legolas role in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Since then, he has rarely been seen without a sword or an arrow in reach: in Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven; in Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy; in the gritty Australian legend Ned Kelly; and, of course, in the still blossoming Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy. (If he were a few years older, he’d have been in Braveheart. That’s a guarantee.) The only exception was a very small role in Black Hawk Down, in which his character breaks his back—but Bloom was cast partly because in real life he actually has broken his back.
Liam Neeson, who starred as Bloom’s father in the somewhat controversial Kingdom, is well attuned to the notion that an epic quality is not a card that every ﬁlm actor has in his deck. “Some actors suit period costumes,” Neeson says, “and others don’t. I always think of Errol Flynn. He looked uncomfortable in a suit—but put him in a ridiculous pair of tights, and he looked to the manor born! John Wayne playing Genghis Khan was quite the other thing. Clint Eastwood in a kilt would look ludicrous. I don’t know what it is. Orlando simply looks the part.”

From their experience in Kingdom, Neeson and Bloom know that this particular talent can double as a curse, for Ridley Scott is an especially meticulous director. “Even our underwear was period,” Neeson recalls, laughing. “It was the full bollocks, you know?”

And the epic quality is sufficiently rare that, once you’ve proved yourself in the genre, you are sought out again and again—another impulse well understood (and, for that matter, experienced) by Liam Neeson. “If I were Jack Warner, I’d get a team of writers, get ’em writing period pieces, and sign him,” Neeson says. “Orlando is like a classic ’40s movie star.”

None of this is to say that Neeson conﬁnes himself to speaking of Bloom’s costumes; he seems a little amazed by how sharply focused the man is, especially for a young actor. “When I was that age—Jesus!—it was the Dark Ages of my emotional growth,” Neeson says. “I knew ****-all about anythin’! Orlando is with it, but not in a hip way. He knows what it takes to make a ﬁlm, so he treats every department equally: the key grip, the gaffer, everyone. He’s right to. Without them, we’re nothing.”

The fact that Orlando Bloom is unusually grounded for a man of 28, sadly, has a lot to do with the actual ground. His career (and inextricably linked with that, his ability to take the long view) was entirely transformed by a potentially fatal fall he took in 1998. Late one night, messing around, he leapt onto a drainpipe while trying to get onto a roof terrace; the pipe gave way, and Bloom fell three stories, shattering his vertebrae. “Until then, I didn’t have a healthy appreciation for life and death—that we’re not invincible,” he says. “And for four days, I faced the idea of living in a wheelchair for the rest of my life. I went to some dark places in my mind. I realized, I’m either going to walk again or I’m not.
“The doctor said he wasn’t sure how severe the spinal-cord damage was,” he says, as an oddly unattractive look of distaste, even horror, crosses his features. “I remember him telling me that, and staring at the ceiling, thinking, I never stared at ceilings before! And I wonder if I’m going to be looking at ceilings for the rest of my life.

“But there’s something interesting,” he adds very quickly. “I knew I wouldn’t. I knew I wouldn’t, I knew…” He repeats the sentence ﬁve times—quick like a stammer, as though he’s still trying to convince himself against hope that this will not be his fate.

The upshot of the accident was nothing short of miraculous. He was in the hospital only a few weeks and walked out on his own power. And the minute he escaped, still constrained by a back brace, he reverted to testing the limits of body and soul. When the time came to remove the titanium pins from his spine, to the doctors’ alarm, they were all fractured. They came out in shards. One of the pins had been driven too deep to remove, by dint of Orlando’s physical overexertion. “I’d been doing stuff right away,” he recalls, shaking his head. “I went straight back into it, man.”

The calming of Orlando Bloom, in the paradoxical underage dotage he now conveys, wasn’t instantaneous. “When I came out of the hospital, I started partying straight away—with the back brace on. It took me a couple of months to realize this was my life, and I didn’t want to mess it up.

“But that accident has informed everything in my life,” he says. “Until you’re close to losing it, you don’t realize. I used to ride motorbikes and drive cars like everything was a racetrack; it was ridiculous. It wasn’t because I thought it was cool; it was just because I loved living on the edge. But I’ve chilled.”

Cameron Crowe, too, sees all of this as key to Bloom’s swift maturation as an actor. “That broken back—that’s his Rosebud,” Crowe says. “It’s the key to him. He’s got pain going on in there. That’s why his silent mode is so interesting. Where other actors feel they have to constantly do something, Orlando doesn’t. Which is great. He’s a real guy with real stuff. Under that puppy-dog energy, there’s darkness.”

Perhaps it was Bloom’s upbringing that made him capable of eventually slowing off of the racetrack. Growing up in Canterbury, and beyond that, the county Kent, exposes you to one of the world’s cradles of sanity—a meadowed realm of constancy—even though some of its denizens look wild when viewed from afar.
“My generation in England was exposed to a huge antidrug campaign,” Bloom recalls. “I was one of the kids in school saying, ‘That ****’s not good.’ I’ve still gotten kicks; don’t get me wrong.”

At this point in the conversation, without a single word of transition, Bloom moves from the romance of drugs to the intoxication of women. “I remember asking my biology teacher, ‘How is HIV and AIDS gonna come to an end?’ ” he says, still popping the sour blueberries. “And the guy said, ‘When people stop having sex.’ I replied, ‘Dude, that’s harsh. That ain’t gonna happen anytime soon.’ I had plenty of vices growing up. But when you’re 21, you wake up and realize that your body is not something you want to **** with.”

To this end, Bloom has even surrendered caffeine—which, for many Englishmen, would be as bitter a defeat as Gallipoli or Yorktown. “I was doing night shoots for Elizabethtown,” he says, “and drinking green tea, which has caffeine. Not an awful lot. Just enough to get me through the shoot. By the end of the night, my back was killing me. It dehydrates your spine. And my back—that’s still my alarm. That’s my canary in the mine shaft.”

Bloom talks endlessly about how lucky he is; after seven years, the worst of his many reckless accidents hasn’t faded from memory. “When you experience the sort of physical pain I went through, you realize you’re not a god,” he says—“that there are limits to what you can do. It keeps you real. I mean, I can walk. I can enjoy a swim in the ocean and a beautiful day. And I was very close to not having that.

“I’m trying now to maintain a sense of balance. I was very extreme in my youth—everything in extremes, man! I’m at a very interesting time right now: a lot of change, growth…a lot of pennies dropping. I’ve a lot to be grateful for.”

This is all odd talk from an actor who, since that accident and many others, has buckled so much swash in the movies. (To say nothing of the fact that, for The Lord of the Rings, he spent vast amounts of time in New Zealand, the adrenaline-sport capital of the world, resisting most of those temptations.) Yet when it comes to doing stunts, he doesn’t hesitate. “I have one of those doctors who tell me, ‘Go for it, man!’ ” he says. “Does he encourage me? No. But I’ve tried to put myself in a physical condition where I’m able to do that stuff.”

“And, of course, for sex,” I toss out, just to lighten things up.
“Yeah, all those mercy lays I got,” he says, mock-wistfully. “Because I was the kid with the broken back!”

“Oh—you need mercy ****s,” I repeat, nearly spitting up my tea. “That’s the funniest thing I’ve heard in my life. You probably had to beg for it.”

Bloom won’t let go of the joke: “I was the kid with the broken back!”

By all evidence, Orlando Bloom has chilled. But the adrenaline chip in his brain is still switched on. He seems to have transferred its capacity from bone-breaking feats to potentially soul-crushing risks on a more emotional plane. “I like to feel alive, man,” he says. “Part of it is danger, part of it is love. Although I’m trying not to have those two realms cross too much. I’ve had a few dangerous women. My cousin once told me, ‘You’re tall, you’re handsome—and you’re gonna have to apologize for it the rest of your life.’ He imparted that information to me.”

“So…you’re still looking for mercy ****s.”

“That’s right!” he says, clinging to modesty with both hands. “I still am. Exactly!”

If, as he claims, Bloom is a bit accident-prone, he is among the most graceful clods ever born. He moves slowly but always seems to be out ahead of you; he gestures rarely, but when he does, every joint of every ﬁnger seems to be underscoring a different, subtle part of his idea.

Despite all the old injuries (broken bones all over his body—here from a motorbike spill, there from something strange that happened with a rope), his athletic prowess is not lost on those with whom he’s worked. Liam Neeson marveled at Bloom’s ﬁght scenes in Kingdom of Heaven. “Some actors are utterly lost if you put a sword in their hands,” he says. “Orlando is all physical grace—and there’s Errol Flynn again!”

Cameron Crowe, for his part, actually directed Bloom in the only television ad Crowe has ever shot, a quasi parody of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, shot in black and white, for Gap clothing. All we saw was Orlando Bloom and Kate Beckinsale running through shadowy streets. “He has this Hard Day’s Night physicality,” Crowe says. “Watching what we’d shot in the Gap commercial, there was Kate Beckinsale—who’s hot!—and we couldn’t stop looking at him. He’s exploding with life.”

The whole blend of modesty and the movie-star looks can only have contributed to Orlando Bloom’s celebrity. In an average week, even with no ﬁlm release in sight, he’s in a hundred articles worldwide—the more so when anything kindles (or is stanched) with the dazzling Kate Bosworth.

That said, he’s not entirely allergic to Hollywood tricks. For instance, when celebrities stay at hotels, as most people know, they check in under false names, like Fred Flintstone or Jay Gatsby. Billy Bob Thornton, for instance, sometimes uses the name of a certain writer. For her part, Kirsten Dunst uses a musical reference.
“I’m not exactly sure what name Orlando goes by,” Dunst says, “but I bet it’s something sexual. He’s very ﬂirty. And that’s easy to understand. You should have seen them in Kentucky: Girls lined up holding signs with his name on them. He was very gracious.”

Typically, Bloom regards most attention as a ﬂeeting thing. And he’s not interested in spending precious time on ﬂeeting things. Especially tabloid attention.

“That stuff is not a part of my daily life,” he says. “Most of it is bullshit. It even becomes hard to have a casual friendship, because suddenly you’re ‘linked to’ that person.… I guess there’s got to be a cost. You can’t live the spoils without having the ﬂip side of that coin. So you learn to live with it.”

Curiously, Bloom is so famous in costume that until recently he was able to blend in when he moved around in public. Cameron Crowe recalls that when the cast of Elizabethtown was shooting and living in Kentucky, girls were lining the streets just to catch a glimpse of Orly Bloom. (Though no one except the tabloids actually calls him Orly.)

“He was incredibly famous, but no one really knew what he looked like,” Crowe says, still amazed. “In Lexington, there was a girls’ national soccer championship team in the hotel. These girls were actually walking the halls—they were roaming in packs—looking for him. I heard them saying things like, ‘He’s on the seventh ﬂoor!’ And he was standing right there. Right there. He just disappeared into the culture.”

That air of mystery is attractive to ﬁlm directors. Crowe recalls reading something Warren Beatty once said—that 75 percent of what people bring to a movie is their perception of the actor. “In that sense, it’s great to have a fresh guy to put in the center of a movie,” Crowe says. “We don’t really know who he is. Orlando is a clean slate. Since Tom Cruise in Risky Business, very few guys that age have been able to do a comedy or drama and be that interesting to look at—and to really hold the center of a movie.”

These days, Bloom’s mother more than compensates for his aversion to his tabloid press. (And of course, when it comes to propriety and accuracy, British tabloids make their American cousins look like Huxley’s Illustrated History of Gardening.) She clips it all, keeps track of his status as “the most downloaded human on earth,” and shuffles through the bags of fan letters he receives. Bloom recoils. “I keep saying, ‘Mom, I don’t want to know,’ ” he says. “I don’t want to see whether I’m on some chart. There will be a time when I won’t be. That doesn’t mean I’m not grateful. But I keep telling her, ‘They keep building me up, so they’re going to tear me down!’

“I keep getting asked what it’s like to be a heartthrob,” he adds, much amused by the unspoken joke: Tempus fugit. “There’s that next kid, believe me, who’s right there on my tail—and if he’s not right now, he’s gonna be!”
Bloom is convincing when he says things like this: offhand remarks a modest person would say so as not to seem like a preening, self-absorbed *** in a magazine article. And when he says he has too much self-doubt to believe the hype, there’s not a trace of posturing. A casting agent once told him that a little self-doubt will get you a long way: It makes you work harder, keeps you sharp. “If you think you can do it all,” Bloom says, suddenly showing some heat, “you’re just gonna sit back. Whereas I’m constantly working at it: doing more sword training for Pirates, getting coached on dialect to make sure it’s as good as it can be for Elizabethtown. I’m always working, because the one time I don’t, I guarantee, is when I’ll end up saying ‘D’oh!’ ”

He looks at his enormous wristwatch somewhat worriedly, for he actually has a dialect session in an hour or so, and more than once he has registered that it’s a real concern for him. (It was also the sole doubt Cameron Crowe had in casting him, though that one doubt was quickly put to rest, Crowe says.)

“Look, I just want to stay normal,” Bloom says, very normally. “That’s the biggest challenge: being able to sit in a café and watch the world go by.”

Granted, wide is the road to temptation and—at least until that next kid catches Orlando J. B. C. Bloom—his world is a sea of temptations. But he prides himself on learning lessons, even other people’s life lessons. “My dad once told me that one of his dreams was coming to Los Angeles, getting a Mustang, and driving it down Sunset Boulevard,” he says, beaming at the memory. “One day, it came true. And he got pulled over by the police. Know why they stopped him? Know why? He was driving too slowly! That’s a great story for me. He was soaking up the environment and he got done! ‘Sir, you got done!’ ”

In more than one sense, Bloom isn’t ﬁnished. Even at the outset of his career, he’s ever ﬂickering with a Buddhist tendency here or there. He chokes at the fact that he’s in an industry where it’s a virtue to label its products (including actors). Yet he has no idea what his label should read. “I’m still trying to formulate the idea of who I am—and part of the problem of having these ideas and images projected on you is that it’s hard enough really ﬁguring that **** out!”

Even in the Shangri-la conﬁnes of Bloom’s temporary home, time does not stop, and the hour is running late. At a dialogue coach’s office across town, there’s a new identity to burnish: some “R” sounds to harden, a few “A” sounds to ﬂatten out. Orlando Bloom shakes his head and eats one last bad blueberry. “There’s only a story in success so far,” he says, refusing to descend from the philosophical level before he ﬂees the hotel out his private exit. “That’s why Cameron made a movie about failure—about ﬁasco. Because we all meet in the dirt. That’s where we meet.”

Stories
From
url=(0062)http://www.theorlandobloomfiles.com/...sun03aug2.html

HE may be Hollywood's hottest young star but Orlando Bloom's biggest fan is his proud mum.
The heart-throb actor has appeared in a string of movie blockbusters, including new box office smash Pirates of the Caribbean.
But the only audience that really matters to him is his mother Sonia Copeland Bloom.
And in an exclusive interview she tells of her devotion to her boy and lifts the lid on his childhood - including the family trauma over his father.
Sonia, a retired company director from Canterbury, Kent, says: "I love Orlando to bits. He gets gorgeous mail.
"His fans are all positive about him. They hero-worship him and they see him as a role model. Already people come to Canterbury and ask for directions to Orlando Bloom's house.
"I think he is a bit of a phenomenon. There is something very special about him and he's almost oblivious to it."
But his life has not been without problems. As a lad, Orlando believed his father was Harry Bloom, the renowned author and campaigner for black rights in South Africa.
Yet at 12, Sonia told him that Harry, who died when Orlando was four, was NOT his biological dad.
His father - and that of his sister Samantha, 28, - was Sonia's lover Colin Stone, who lived with her while Harry was terminally ill after a stroke.
Yet Sonia stresses: "Orlando has a very happy background. It is something he has grown up with. Orlando is not sad.
"It was marvellous when he learned that Colin was his father. He was brought up surrounded by a loving family."
Orlando, 26, who earns £2million a movie, says: "It's an unusual story but then again, you show me a family and I'll show you an unusual story."
The actor was given the name Orlando because Harry wanted something easy to remember.
Sonia explains: "Harry had trouble with his students' names and thought he would always remember an Orlando. The family thought he might get teased but he has always loved having it."
Now Orlando is making his name in the movie capital. Pirates hit No 1 in the US in its first weekend, taking £44 million in five days.
The hunk stars alongside Johnny Depp in the £80 million Disney blockbuster. They are pictured together right.
Orlando, who also appears in The Lord of the Rings trilogy as blond elf Legolas and has been filming mega-budget epic Troy with Brad Pitt, also had to overcome other problems.
Like his Pirates co-star Keira Knightley, Orlando is dyslexic. Sonia helped him overcome it.
Sonia says: "He reads scripts all the time. It hardly effects him now. Orlando got eight O-Levels and 3 A-Levels.
"He is a wonderful sculptor. Very artistic and very bright."
In return, Orlando admits he is still very close to his mum. He says: "I'm a hero to her but what is really important to me is my family and my friends and the people who are closest to me. I try to maintain some sort of sense of reality through work, friends and my family."
Sonia made sure her son got a good education. Orlando went to £9,000-a-year St Edmund's public school in Canterbury.
But the promising young star's acting career nearly ended before it began. In 1998, while he was a student at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, he fell three storeys from a rooftop terrace and broke his back.
Orlando recalls: "I'm rather accident prone I have to admit. I have also broken my ribs, my nose, both my legs, my arm, my wrist, a finger and a toe and cracked my skull three times."
Fortunately, despite filming the tough sword fights in Pirates of the Caribbean, he came away with just a couple of scratches and bruising.
But shooting on the the Caribbean on real sailing ships did get a bit hairy.
Orlando says "We were sometimes 20 miles out at sea and the swells got kind of big. You can't get off the ship when you're that far from land."
In the film, released in Britain next Friday, Orlando plays romantic lead Will Turner, who falls in love with Elizabeth Swann, played by Keira.
As well as Depp the story, about a cursed pirate ship, also stars Geoffrey Rush.
Orlando, whose nickname is Orli, says: "I love making films like Pirates, I love dressing up."
Orlando has become a star in a short time. At the age of 16 he joined the National Youth Theatre in London. He landed bit parts in TV's Casualty and Midsomer Murders before studying at the Guildhall.
He says: "The opportunity to do The Lord of the Rings came straight out of school and it wasn't much of a decision. I was like, 'Where do I sign?'"
The 5ft 11in star has been linked to some beautiful girls. But he puts his career first.
He says: "Women are great. But I didn't take up acting so I could kiss a girl."
From
url=(0065)http://www.theorlandobloomfiles.com/...ofthefall.html

Legend of The Fall January 9, 2003 by a fan

Orlando Bloom has spoken repeatedly in interviews about his life-changing experience when he fell from a window four years ago when he was 21. Of course, people ASK about it all the time ... it's still going in current (1-03) magazines. Here's the story ...???

While a student at Guildhall, Orlando was at a friend's house in Notting Hill after having a Sunday lunch ("no excessive drinking" he says) and was trying to reach a roof terrace to kick in a warped door by climbing out a window that was about a meter and a half away ... his foot hit the guttering instead of the roof, it gave way, and he fell three stories down, just missed a rusty railing.? He was unconscious briefly, couldn't be rescued by helicopter because they couldn't get the chopper in to where he was, was finally carried out by EMT's with a "crane".? He lay helplessly in hospital for several days, in terrible pain and occasionally sedated to unconsciousness while they did neuroscans and then told him he might never walk again, which must have been absolutely devastating and terrifying for him.? "Four days of having to deal with the possibility of that as a reality" shook him to the core, as it would any of us, and altered his view of life.? Then doctors did six hours of back surgery, piecing him together with bolts and plates, leaving a long scar over the incision they worked in.
The operation restored his ability to move his legs and he was able to walk out of the hospital on crutches in 12 days.? He wore a back brace for months? ... there was a question of whether he'd be able to finish his schooling at Guildhall, but he did ... and now he has gone on to glory and fame as an action hero, of all things.

Miraculous ... yes, he may have had his miracle here.? And I'm very glad he did, for we never would have known his sweet sunny spirit or seen his handsome face if the gods had not set him back upright and shoved him into his future as a storyteller on a worldwide stage.? For that I am very thankful, just as he is.? His humility and respect for the experience are part of what makes us care about him so much, methinks.

02-12-2007, 05:13 AM	#7 (permalink)
Gertrude Junior Member Join Date: Sep 2006 Posts: 275 My Profile	Hi Tcup4jdh ! I am a newbie here, but am quite a long time OB fan. I also like to talk about Josh coz he’s my sister’s fave actor (I posted at Josh’s forum once about pizza) but am a solid OB fan. Actually, right now there’s nothing to catch up on OB b’coz his career is on a standstill and regarding his personal life, he’s just so devoted to Sidi and being happy with Penelope Cruz (but nothing serious is cooking up between them yet). Rather, you’d love to learn about his past and these interviews/stories will help you to know him better—if you haven’t read them before. Interviews From url=(0064)http://www.glam.com/g/p/3000465/5523...0/20/99154282/ Orlando Bloom is undoubtedly one of Hollywood’s finest rising actors, and one of Britain’s sexiest male exports. With over 15 films under his belt, and several more in the works, it was amazing he had time to come and pick up three surfboard awards (for Action-Adventure movie of the summer, Choice Hottie and Choice Rumble) at the 2006 Teen Choice Awards in Universal City, CA. Here's what he had to say.... How does it feel to be a part of such an incredible movie trilogy like Pirates Of The Caribbean?Great. I have to say it’s great to be a part of a film that kids can really enjoy going to see and respond to, and they seem to really love it. It’s something great for people to enjoy. Who did you bring with you to the Teen Choice Awards?I have one of my best friends from London here with me tonight actually. He’s never been to anything like this so for him it’s kind of like the real deal. Very exciting, you know? What was the big highlight of your summer? Wow! Geez, the highlight of my summer would have to be getting a bit of time off actually! I got about three weeks between filming the 2nd and the 3rd installments of Pirates, so I got to hang out in London with my mom and my friends and my family Growing up, all kids have chores their parents make them do. What was the worst chore your mom ever made you do? You know, my mom used to make me polish the brass and the door knobs and other stuff. I kind of liked it, I don’t know…but now… (laughter) What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?Be true to yourself. To thine own self be true, and that’s a real challenge. It was given to me numerous times in my life by different people like teachers, coaches, professors. What are you working on after Pirates?I’ve got to tell you that there’s this new film I did in the middle of all these big movies, it’s called Haven and it’s out September 15. It’s from a first time director, a 24-year old kid did it. He shot in the Caribbean again, believe it or not, I seem to not be able to get away from the Caribbean. But there is no sword in it, in this one, but it’s um, I’m really proud of it. It’s a real… It’s a kind of youth culture movie. It’s a sort of Romeo and Juliet, kind of West Side Story broken love story and it’s a good one, you know? So hopefully... that’s out September 15. From url=(0063)http://www.elflady.com/orlandolove/p...p?t=6638&pp=40 Orlando Bloom sits chewing banana and peanut butter on toast, having his morning tea on what could be the patio of a modest little house anywhere in the world—watching his coal black mutt ramble around on the grass, chew twigs, and relieve himself. But little things everywhere hint that this is a partly ﬁctional realm. Bloom is swathed in one of the long scarves he favors, covered in trinkets, and wearing combat-weight black boots, but because he has become so extraordinarily well-known for playing epic roles, the overall effect is of a man who is not quite modern but in modern dress. And this is no man’s house but a lavish bungalow at the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood. It’s not even one of the A-list bungalows down on the main level, where John Belushi breathed his last. This one is far more grand—seemingly ﬂoating above the hotel, insulated from the world by heavy gray wooden doors. It even has a private exit so that Bloom can come and go without fear of paparazzi. The moment he speaks—despite outward appearances—it’s clear that the only thing that isn’t tinged with unreality is Bloom himself, who comes across as impossibly levelheaded. He is ﬁnishing his ﬁrst role as a contemporary American man, a character in the ﬁctional real world, in Cameron Crowe’s new romantic comedy, Elizabethtown. “Being a Brit, I’ve spent most of my time here either in New York or L.A.,” Bloom says, unselfconsciously smacking peanut butter as he speaks. “But during the Elizabethtown shoot, we were staying in the Brown Hotel, a classic, old-school place in Louisville. Going to Kentucky was a whole different side of America I never knew about. It was America. The hats, the suits—they’re not letting go of their traditions. Which is great. I love traditions. I mean, cultural ones.” In contrast to his sensible demeanor, Bloom is abnormally good-looking. And it’s often hard to bear in mind how young he is—how much work and fame he has gathered up in a scant four years. He is routinely on all the lists: People’s Most Beautiful, the Internet’s Most Downloaded, you name it. But some fairly grim experience has made him play against type in real life. Laconically staring out over the fronds and high hibiscus of the Chateau and eating unripe blueberries, he doesn’t hint at being aware of his Old Hollywood appeal—and he certainly doesn’t come off as ethereal. There’s nothing otherworldly about the inside of the house, either. It’s a mess, scattered with health food, research, and mementos, much of which is still in boxes, since Bloom has been living here a month during one of his downtimes with Kate Bosworth. In the bedroom is residue from old work: There’s a DVD about the Crusades, ancient homework for Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven. Bloom grins and admits that while it’s ideal to read entire books, DVDs have the appeal of being condensed and visual. “Knowledge is power,” he says—“but having too much can actually get in the way. You simply want to know what world you’re in, and immerse yourself.” He’s taken time to hang a Cool Hand Luke poster, since he reveres Paul Newman. The kitchen is an aftermath of some kind of organic-food explosion. Everywhere you turn, there are protein shakes, containers of carrot and mango juice, oranges, tomatoes, and Lord-knows-what made out of tofu. “I haven’t gone back to being vegetarian,” Bloom says, surveying the chaos. “I’ve gone back to the process of seeing what foods give me energy. When you’re working and you’re required to switch it on, you need to know what fuels you.” Even Sidi, the wild black dog, has a prized possession or two in the wilderness of boxes and CDs and photos. Cameron Crowe has awarded the pup with a small framed Elizabethtown poster and signed it, “Try to eat smaller portions.” Walking out the door, one sees the least artful object in the house: a sign, in ﬁerce block lettering, that reads DO NOT LET THE DOG INSIDE! Sidi is explicitly banished from the house, given his taste for apocalypse. “When I’m not here, he really tears up the place,” Bloom says, as the lone crease in his forehead deepens slightly. “He can be pretty devastating.” It was the same during the Elizabethtown shoots. Kirsten Dunst marveled at what a tearaway that dog could be, and says Orlando’s trailer had to be “Sidi-proofed.” “They had to put a sheet of plastic on the ﬂoor!” she says, laughing. “That dog just doesn’t care. And Orlando’s way of unstressing between takes is to jump around like a 5-year-old or ride on a pint-size scooter, whereas I’m more self-critical. He was always playing with Sidi between takes, and Sidi is still in many ways a street dog.” Then again, in many ways, so is Orlando. Elizabethtown is vintage Cameron Crowe: dead center in the crosshatch between comedy and drama. It opens with Bloom’s character experiencing a professional failure—more accurately, as his character narrates, a ﬁasco—of staggering proportions. A shoe he has designed for an Oregon-based company (clearly modeled after Nike) is such a disaster that it’s being recalled, losing the company $972 million, all of it Bloom’s fault. To magnify Bloom’s self-loathing, the head of the company (played to the hilt by Alec Baldwin) leads him on a daunting walk through the corporate complex, explaining the sheer magnitude of this disaster. At one point, the two gaze onto a vast, NASA-scale ecological laboratory; Baldwin’s character pauses and ruefully observes, “We could have saved the planet.” At another point, laughing out his grief, Baldwin remarks that he has read that Bloom’s shoe “may actually cause an entire generation to return to bare feet.” Bloom’s character responds by creating an elaborate suicide machine and is on the brink of using it when he learns that his father has died: He must travel to Kentucky to retrieve the body. So begins a chain of events that, as is so often untrue in Hollywood movies, is impossible to predict. Crowe doesn’t deal in cinematic formulas. The ﬁlm is strangely both intimate and sprawling, hitting a lot of giant themes— fathers and sons, life and death, hope and regret—through small, subtle encounters. It’s striking how easily Bloom ﬁts into regular clothing and the twenty-ﬁrst century after having spent most of his career in chain mail, on horseback, or shouting things like “The Ring must be destroyed!” No ﬁlm actor in memory has been so furiously attached to the epic and fantasy genres as Orlando Bloom. After making his debut as a rent boy in a 1997 ﬁlm about Oscar Wilde, he spent three years at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama—then, right out of the gate, landed the Legolas role in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Since then, he has rarely been seen without a sword or an arrow in reach: in Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven; in Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy; in the gritty Australian legend Ned Kelly; and, of course, in the still blossoming Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy. (If he were a few years older, he’d have been in Braveheart. That’s a guarantee.) The only exception was a very small role in Black Hawk Down, in which his character breaks his back—but Bloom was cast partly because in real life he actually has broken his back. Liam Neeson, who starred as Bloom’s father in the somewhat controversial Kingdom, is well attuned to the notion that an epic quality is not a card that every ﬁlm actor has in his deck. “Some actors suit period costumes,” Neeson says, “and others don’t. I always think of Errol Flynn. He looked uncomfortable in a suit—but put him in a ridiculous pair of tights, and he looked to the manor born! John Wayne playing Genghis Khan was quite the other thing. Clint Eastwood in a kilt would look ludicrous. I don’t know what it is. Orlando simply looks the part.” From their experience in Kingdom, Neeson and Bloom know that this particular talent can double as a curse, for Ridley Scott is an especially meticulous director. “Even our underwear was period,” Neeson recalls, laughing. “It was the full bollocks, you know?” And the epic quality is sufficiently rare that, once you’ve proved yourself in the genre, you are sought out again and again—another impulse well understood (and, for that matter, experienced) by Liam Neeson. “If I were Jack Warner, I’d get a team of writers, get ’em writing period pieces, and sign him,” Neeson says. “Orlando is like a classic ’40s movie star.” None of this is to say that Neeson conﬁnes himself to speaking of Bloom’s costumes; he seems a little amazed by how sharply focused the man is, especially for a young actor. “When I was that age—Jesus!—it was the Dark Ages of my emotional growth,” Neeson says. “I knew **-all about anythin’! Orlando is with it, but not in a hip way. He knows what it takes to make a ﬁlm, so he treats every department equally: the key grip, the gaffer, everyone. He’s right to. Without them, we’re nothing.” The fact that Orlando Bloom is unusually grounded for a man of 28, sadly, has a lot to do with the actual ground. His career (and inextricably linked with that, his ability to take the long view) was entirely transformed by a potentially fatal fall he took in 1998. Late one night, messing around, he leapt onto a drainpipe while trying to get onto a roof terrace; the pipe gave way, and Bloom fell three stories, shattering his vertebrae. “Until then, I didn’t have a healthy appreciation for life and death—that we’re not invincible,” he says. “And for four days, I faced the idea of living in a wheelchair for the rest of my life. I went to some dark places in my mind. I realized, I’m either going to walk again or I’m not. “The doctor said he wasn’t sure how severe the spinal-cord damage was,” he says, as an oddly unattractive look of distaste, even horror, crosses his features. “I remember him telling me that, and staring at the ceiling, thinking, I never stared at ceilings before! And I wonder if I’m going to be looking at ceilings for the rest of my life. “But there’s something interesting,” he adds very quickly. “I knew I wouldn’t. I knew I wouldn’t, I knew…” He repeats the sentence ﬁve times—quick like a stammer, as though he’s still trying to convince himself against hope that this will not be his fate. The upshot of the accident was nothing short of miraculous. He was in the hospital only a few weeks and walked out on his own power. And the minute he escaped, still constrained by a back brace, he reverted to testing the limits of body and soul. When the time came to remove the titanium pins from his spine, to the doctors’ alarm, they were all fractured. They came out in shards. One of the pins had been driven too deep to remove, by dint of Orlando’s physical overexertion. “I’d been doing stuff right away,” he recalls, shaking his head. “I went straight back into it, man.” The calming of Orlando Bloom, in the paradoxical underage dotage he now conveys, wasn’t instantaneous. “When I came out of the hospital, I started partying straight away—with the back brace on. It took me a couple of months to realize this was my life, and I didn’t want to mess it up. “But that accident has informed everything in my life,” he says. “Until you’re close to losing it, you don’t realize. I used to ride motorbikes and drive cars like everything was a racetrack; it was ridiculous. It wasn’t because I thought it was cool; it was just because I loved living on the edge. But I’ve chilled.” Cameron Crowe, too, sees all of this as key to Bloom’s swift maturation as an actor. “That broken back—that’s his Rosebud,” Crowe says. “It’s the key to him. He’s got pain going on in there. That’s why his silent mode is so interesting. Where other actors feel they have to constantly do something, Orlando doesn’t. Which is great. He’s a real guy with real stuff. Under that puppy-dog energy, there’s darkness.” Perhaps it was Bloom’s upbringing that made him capable of eventually slowing off of the racetrack. Growing up in Canterbury, and beyond that, the county Kent, exposes you to one of the world’s cradles of sanity—a meadowed realm of constancy—even though some of its denizens look wild when viewed from afar. “My generation in England was exposed to a huge antidrug campaign,” Bloom recalls. “I was one of the kids in school saying, ‘That ’s not good.’ I’ve still gotten kicks; don’t get me wrong.” At this point in the conversation, without a single word of transition, Bloom moves from the romance of drugs to the intoxication of women. “I remember asking my biology teacher, ‘How is HIV and AIDS gonna come to an end?’ ” he says, still popping the sour blueberries. “And the guy said, ‘When people stop having sex.’ I replied, ‘Dude, that’s harsh. That ain’t gonna happen anytime soon.’ I had plenty of vices growing up. But when you’re 21, you wake up and realize that your body is not something you want to with.” To this end, Bloom has even surrendered caffeine—which, for many Englishmen, would be as bitter a defeat as Gallipoli or Yorktown. “I was doing night shoots for Elizabethtown,” he says, “and drinking green tea, which has caffeine. Not an awful lot. Just enough to get me through the shoot. By the end of the night, my back was killing me. It dehydrates your spine. And my back—that’s still my alarm. That’s my canary in the mine shaft.” Bloom talks endlessly about how lucky he is; after seven years, the worst of his many reckless accidents hasn’t faded from memory. “When you experience the sort of physical pain I went through, you realize you’re not a god,” he says—“that there are limits to what you can do. It keeps you real. I mean, I can walk. I can enjoy a swim in the ocean and a beautiful day. And I was very close to not having that. “I’m trying now to maintain a sense of balance. I was very extreme in my youth—everything in extremes, man! I’m at a very interesting time right now: a lot of change, growth…a lot of pennies dropping. I’ve a lot to be grateful for.” This is all odd talk from an actor who, since that accident and many others, has buckled so much swash in the movies. (To say nothing of the fact that, for The Lord of the Rings, he spent vast amounts of time in New Zealand, the adrenaline-sport capital of the world, resisting most of those temptations.) Yet when it comes to doing stunts, he doesn’t hesitate. “I have one of those doctors who tell me, ‘Go for it, man!’ ” he says. “Does he encourage me? No. But I’ve tried to put myself in a physical condition where I’m able to do that stuff.” “And, of course, for sex,” I toss out, just to lighten things up. “Yeah, all those mercy lays I got,” he says, mock-wistfully. “Because I was the kid with the broken back!” “Oh—you need mercy s,” I repeat, nearly spitting up my tea. “That’s the funniest thing I’ve heard in my life. You probably had to beg for it.” Bloom won’t let go of the joke: “I was the kid with the broken back!” By all evidence, Orlando Bloom has chilled. But the adrenaline chip in his brain is still switched on. He seems to have transferred its capacity from bone-breaking feats to potentially soul-crushing risks on a more emotional plane. “I like to feel alive, man,” he says. “Part of it is danger, part of it is love. Although I’m trying not to have those two realms cross too much. I’ve had a few dangerous women. My cousin once told me, ‘You’re tall, you’re handsome—and you’re gonna have to apologize for it the rest of your life.’ He imparted that information to me.” “So…you’re still looking for mercy s.” “That’s right!” he says, clinging to modesty with both hands. “I still am. Exactly!” If, as he claims, Bloom is a bit accident-prone, he is among the most graceful clods ever born. He moves slowly but always seems to be out ahead of you; he gestures rarely, but when he does, every joint of every ﬁnger seems to be underscoring a different, subtle part of his idea. Despite all the old injuries (broken bones all over his body—here from a motorbike spill, there from something strange that happened with a rope), his athletic prowess is not lost on those with whom he’s worked. Liam Neeson marveled at Bloom’s ﬁght scenes in Kingdom of Heaven. “Some actors are utterly lost if you put a sword in their hands,” he says. “Orlando is all physical grace—and there’s Errol Flynn again!” Cameron Crowe, for his part, actually directed Bloom in the only television ad Crowe has ever shot, a quasi parody of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, shot in black and white, for Gap clothing. All we saw was Orlando Bloom and Kate Beckinsale running through shadowy streets. “He has this Hard Day’s Night physicality,” Crowe says. “Watching what we’d shot in the Gap commercial, there was Kate Beckinsale—who’s hot!—and we couldn’t stop looking at him. He’s exploding with life.” The whole blend of modesty and the movie-star looks can only have contributed to Orlando Bloom’s celebrity. In an average week, even with no ﬁlm release in sight, he’s in a hundred articles worldwide—the more so when anything kindles (or is stanched) with the dazzling Kate Bosworth. That said, he’s not entirely allergic to Hollywood tricks. For instance, when celebrities stay at hotels, as most people know, they check in under false names, like Fred Flintstone or Jay Gatsby. Billy Bob Thornton, for instance, sometimes uses the name of a certain writer. For her part, Kirsten Dunst uses a musical reference. “I’m not exactly sure what name Orlando goes by,” Dunst says, “but I bet it’s something sexual. He’s very ﬂirty. And that’s easy to understand. You should have seen them in Kentucky: Girls lined up holding signs with his name on them. He was very gracious.” Typically, Bloom regards most attention as a ﬂeeting thing. And he’s not interested in spending precious time on ﬂeeting things. Especially tabloid attention. “That stuff is not a part of my daily life,” he says. “Most of it is bullshit. It even becomes hard to have a casual friendship, because suddenly you’re ‘linked to’ that person.… I guess there’s got to be a cost. You can’t live the spoils without having the ﬂip side of that coin. So you learn to live with it.” Curiously, Bloom is so famous in costume that until recently he was able to blend in when he moved around in public. Cameron Crowe recalls that when the cast of Elizabethtown was shooting and living in Kentucky, girls were lining the streets just to catch a glimpse of Orly Bloom. (Though no one except the tabloids actually calls him Orly.) “He was incredibly famous, but no one really knew what he looked like,” Crowe says, still amazed. “In Lexington, there was a girls’ national soccer championship team in the hotel. These girls were actually walking the halls—they were roaming in packs—looking for him. I heard them saying things like, ‘He’s on the seventh ﬂoor!’ And he was standing right there. Right there. He just disappeared into the culture.” That air of mystery is attractive to ﬁlm directors. Crowe recalls reading something Warren Beatty once said—that 75 percent of what people bring to a movie is their perception of the actor. “In that sense, it’s great to have a fresh guy to put in the center of a movie,” Crowe says. “We don’t really know who he is. Orlando is a clean slate. Since Tom Cruise in Risky Business, very few guys that age have been able to do a comedy or drama and be that interesting to look at—and to really hold the center of a movie.” These days, Bloom’s mother more than compensates for his aversion to his tabloid press. (And of course, when it comes to propriety and accuracy, British tabloids make their American cousins look like Huxley’s Illustrated History of Gardening.) She clips it all, keeps track of his status as “the most downloaded human on earth,” and shuffles through the bags of fan letters he receives. Bloom recoils. “I keep saying, ‘Mom, I don’t want to know,’ ” he says. “I don’t want to see whether I’m on some chart. There will be a time when I won’t be. That doesn’t mean I’m not grateful. But I keep telling her, ‘They keep building me up, so they’re going to tear me down!’ “I keep getting asked what it’s like to be a heartthrob,” he adds, much amused by the unspoken joke: Tempus fugit. “There’s that next kid, believe me, who’s right there on my tail—and if he’s not right now, he’s gonna be!” Bloom is convincing when he says things like this: offhand remarks a modest person would say so as not to seem like a preening, self-absorbed * in a magazine article. And when he says he has too much self-doubt to believe the hype, there’s not a trace of posturing. A casting agent once told him that a little self-doubt will get you a long way: It makes you work harder, keeps you sharp. “If you think you can do it all,” Bloom says, suddenly showing some heat, “you’re just gonna sit back. Whereas I’m constantly working at it: doing more sword training for Pirates, getting coached on dialect to make sure it’s as good as it can be for Elizabethtown. I’m always working, because the one time I don’t, I guarantee, is when I’ll end up saying ‘D’oh!’ ” He looks at his enormous wristwatch somewhat worriedly, for he actually has a dialect session in an hour or so, and more than once he has registered that it’s a real concern for him. (It was also the sole doubt Cameron Crowe had in casting him, though that one doubt was quickly put to rest, Crowe says.) “Look, I just want to stay normal,” Bloom says, very normally. “That’s the biggest challenge: being able to sit in a café and watch the world go by.” Granted, wide is the road to temptation and—at least until that next kid catches Orlando J. B. C. Bloom—his world is a sea of temptations. But he prides himself on learning lessons, even other people’s life lessons. “My dad once told me that one of his dreams was coming to Los Angeles, getting a Mustang, and driving it down Sunset Boulevard,” he says, beaming at the memory. “One day, it came true. And he got pulled over by the police. Know why they stopped him? Know why? He was driving too slowly! That’s a great story for me. He was soaking up the environment and he got done! ‘Sir, you got done!’ ” In more than one sense, Bloom isn’t ﬁnished. Even at the outset of his career, he’s ever ﬂickering with a Buddhist tendency here or there. He chokes at the fact that he’s in an industry where it’s a virtue to label its products (including actors). Yet he has no idea what his label should read. “I’m still trying to formulate the idea of who I am—and part of the problem of having these ideas and images projected on you is that it’s hard enough really ﬁguring that **** out!” Even in the Shangri-la conﬁnes of Bloom’s temporary home, time does not stop, and the hour is running late. At a dialogue coach’s office across town, there’s a new identity to burnish: some “R” sounds to harden, a few “A” sounds to ﬂatten out. Orlando Bloom shakes his head and eats one last bad blueberry. “There’s only a story in success so far,” he says, refusing to descend from the philosophical level before he ﬂees the hotel out his private exit. “That’s why Cameron made a movie about failure—about ﬁasco. Because we all meet in the dirt. That’s where we meet.” Stories From url=(0062)http://www.theorlandobloomfiles.com/...sun03aug2.html HE may be Hollywood's hottest young star but Orlando Bloom's biggest fan is his proud mum. The heart-throb actor has appeared in a string of movie blockbusters, including new box office smash Pirates of the Caribbean. But the only audience that really matters to him is his mother Sonia Copeland Bloom. And in an exclusive interview she tells of her devotion to her boy and lifts the lid on his childhood - including the family trauma over his father. Sonia, a retired company director from Canterbury, Kent, says: "I love Orlando to bits. He gets gorgeous mail. "His fans are all positive about him. They hero-worship him and they see him as a role model. Already people come to Canterbury and ask for directions to Orlando Bloom's house. "I think he is a bit of a phenomenon. There is something very special about him and he's almost oblivious to it." But his life has not been without problems. As a lad, Orlando believed his father was Harry Bloom, the renowned author and campaigner for black rights in South Africa. Yet at 12, Sonia told him that Harry, who died when Orlando was four, was NOT his biological dad. His father - and that of his sister Samantha, 28, - was Sonia's lover Colin Stone, who lived with her while Harry was terminally ill after a stroke. Yet Sonia stresses: "Orlando has a very happy background. It is something he has grown up with. Orlando is not sad. "It was marvellous when he learned that Colin was his father. He was brought up surrounded by a loving family." Orlando, 26, who earns £2million a movie, says: "It's an unusual story but then again, you show me a family and I'll show you an unusual story." The actor was given the name Orlando because Harry wanted something easy to remember. Sonia explains: "Harry had trouble with his students' names and thought he would always remember an Orlando. The family thought he might get teased but he has always loved having it." Now Orlando is making his name in the movie capital. Pirates hit No 1 in the US in its first weekend, taking £44 million in five days. The hunk stars alongside Johnny Depp in the £80 million Disney blockbuster. They are pictured together right. Orlando, who also appears in The Lord of the Rings trilogy as blond elf Legolas and has been filming mega-budget epic Troy with Brad Pitt, also had to overcome other problems. Like his Pirates co-star Keira Knightley, Orlando is dyslexic. Sonia helped him overcome it. Sonia says: "He reads scripts all the time. It hardly effects him now. Orlando got eight O-Levels and 3 A-Levels. "He is a wonderful sculptor. Very artistic and very bright." In return, Orlando admits he is still very close to his mum. He says: "I'm a hero to her but what is really important to me is my family and my friends and the people who are closest to me. I try to maintain some sort of sense of reality through work, friends and my family." Sonia made sure her son got a good education. Orlando went to £9,000-a-year St Edmund's public school in Canterbury. But the promising young star's acting career nearly ended before it began. In 1998, while he was a student at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, he fell three storeys from a rooftop terrace and broke his back. Orlando recalls: "I'm rather accident prone I have to admit. I have also broken my ribs, my nose, both my legs, my arm, my wrist, a finger and a toe and cracked my skull three times." Fortunately, despite filming the tough sword fights in Pirates of the Caribbean, he came away with just a couple of scratches and bruising. But shooting on the the Caribbean on real sailing ships did get a bit hairy. Orlando says "We were sometimes 20 miles out at sea and the swells got kind of big. You can't get off the ship when you're that far from land." In the film, released in Britain next Friday, Orlando plays romantic lead Will Turner, who falls in love with Elizabeth Swann, played by Keira. As well as Depp the story, about a cursed pirate ship, also stars Geoffrey Rush. Orlando, whose nickname is Orli, says: "I love making films like Pirates, I love dressing up." Orlando has become a star in a short time. At the age of 16 he joined the National Youth Theatre in London. He landed bit parts in TV's Casualty and Midsomer Murders before studying at the Guildhall. He says: "The opportunity to do The Lord of the Rings came straight out of school and it wasn't much of a decision. I was like, 'Where do I sign?'" The 5ft 11in star has been linked to some beautiful girls. But he puts his career first. He says: "Women are great. But I didn't take up acting so I could kiss a girl." From url=(0065)http://www.theorlandobloomfiles.com/...ofthefall.html Legend of The Fall January 9, 2003 by a fan Orlando Bloom has spoken repeatedly in interviews about his life-changing experience when he fell from a window four years ago when he was 21. Of course, people ASK about it all the time ... it's still going in current (1-03) magazines. Here's the story ...??? While a student at Guildhall, Orlando was at a friend's house in Notting Hill after having a Sunday lunch ("no excessive drinking" he says) and was trying to reach a roof terrace to kick in a warped door by climbing out a window that was about a meter and a half away ... his foot hit the guttering instead of the roof, it gave way, and he fell three stories down, just missed a rusty railing.? He was unconscious briefly, couldn't be rescued by helicopter because they couldn't get the chopper in to where he was, was finally carried out by EMT's with a "crane".? He lay helplessly in hospital for several days, in terrible pain and occasionally sedated to unconsciousness while they did neuroscans and then told him he might never walk again, which must have been absolutely devastating and terrifying for him.? "Four days of having to deal with the possibility of that as a reality" shook him to the core, as it would any of us, and altered his view of life.? Then doctors did six hours of back surgery, piecing him together with bolts and plates, leaving a long scar over the incision they worked in. The operation restored his ability to move his legs and he was able to walk out of the hospital on crutches in 12 days.? He wore a back brace for months? ... there was a question of whether he'd be able to finish his schooling at Guildhall, but he did ... and now he has gone on to glory and fame as an action hero, of all things. Miraculous ... yes, he may have had his miracle here.? And I'm very glad he did, for we never would have known his sweet sunny spirit or seen his handsome face if the gods had not set him back upright and shoved him into his future as a storyteller on a worldwide stage.? For that I am very thankful, just as he is.? His humility and respect for the experience are part of what makes us care about him so much, methinks. Last edited by Gertrude; 02-12-2007 at 08:55 AM..