Jim Sturgess
Jim Sturgess
Jim Sturgess is an English actor and singer-songwriter. Sturgess was born May 16, 1978. He is most popularly known for his role in the 2007 musical romance drama, Across the Universe in which Sturgess played the main role of Jude. He is also credited with the role of Ben Campbell in the film 21. Born in Wandsworth, London, he was raised in Farnham, Surrey. There he went to Frensham Heights School. He spent most of his youth skateboarding around his local car parks and started his first band as early as 15 years old where they would rehearse in the garage of his friend’s dad’s house. The band would also play gigs in and around his local area to any publican who would turn a blind eye to the fact that they were all under age. Sturgess’s first acting experience came when the local theatre group came to his school looking for children to audition for the local play. Quickly realising that he would be able to miss school, he went along to the audition and landed one of the parts in the play. It was clear to both his school and his parents that he had a natural talent, but it was always music rather than acting that was at the forefront of Sturgess’s mind.
Sturgess moved to Manchester to attend Salford University hoping it would enable him to start another band and hang around the Manchester music scene, where most of his music idols were from. In Manchester, he fell-in with a group of aspiring actors and film-makers, and his passion for acting was re-ignited. He started to write and perform his own short films and plays. While performing his one-person show ‘BUZZIN’, based around his performance poetry, Jim was discovered by an acting agent. He graduated from the University of Salford in 1999 with an HND in Media and Performance.
In 2007, he got his big break when he was cast in Julie Taymor’s musical Across the Universe, portraying Jude Feeny, a young man who travels to the US amid the raging throes of the late 1960s and falls in love with a sheltered American teenager, Lucy, played by Evan Rachel Wood.