Jamie Foreman: The British actor and son of an infamous gang leader
Plenty of actors have built their careers playing gangsters and gang members, but one British theatre found itself in the unique position of carving out a career on screens both big and small, having grown up around the real-life criminal underworld.
From the 1950s through to the 1980s, Freddie Foreman was a notorious gangland figure and high-profile associate of the Kray twins, earning the ominous nickname of ‘Brown Bread Fred’ on account of his ability to make bodies disappear without a single trace being left behind.
Foreman was acquitted of two murders in the 1960s, but when his autobiography Respect was published in 1997, he came clean and admitted he’d killed both Tommy ‘Ginger’ Marks and Frank ‘The Mad Axeman’ Mitchell, knowing full well that the ‘double jeopardy’ rule meant he couldn’t be tried twice for the same crime having failed to be convicted the first time around.
When his son Jamie decided that he wanted to pursue a career in the performing arts, then, it was almost inevitable that he’d find plenty of work playing unsavoury characters. Sure enough, with such memorable roles as Previous Team #2 in the hooligan movie I.D., a racist cabbie in Nil By Mouth, and a recurring role in the Rise of the Footsoldier series as Sam, he’s been in and around the gang life on-screen.
That being said, he did play the Earl of Sussex in acclaimed period drama Elizabeth, shared scenes with Johnny Depp as Thuggish Constable in Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow, and took the part of Bill Sykes in Roman Polanski’s version of Oliver Twist, not to mention a stint on EastEnders after replacing Terence Beesley as Derek Branning and racking up 145 episodes during his tenure.
Guy Ritchie had a habit of plucking people either from the streets or with the right type of background to fill out the ensembles of his early features Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, so when his producing partner Matthew Vaughn struck out on his own to make his feature-length directorial debut Layer Cake, it was reasonable to assume he’d do much the same.
Standing opposite Daniel Craig’s unnamed protagonist, Foreman makes a memorable contribution to the hard-edged crime story as Duke, a low-level thug in the process of selling a million ecstasy tablets, with future Academy Award nominee Sally Hawkins’ Slasher at his side, along with a crew of knuckle-dragging thugs led by his right-hand man Gazza, played by Burn Gorman.
It’s not the biggest or showiest part in Layer Cake, but it can’t have been too difficult for Foreman to channel the spirit of London’s shadier corners, considering that was exactly the background his father had dedicated decades of his life to, gathering an intimidating reputation along the way.
