Damian Lewis

Lewis was born on 11 February 1971 in St John's Wood, London, the eldest son of Charlotte Mary (née Bowater) and John Watcyn Lewis, a City insurance broker with Lloyd's. His paternal grandparents were Welsh, and he says he considers himself "London Welsh". His maternal grandfather was Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Ian Bowater, Lord Mayor of London, and his maternal grandmother's ancestors include Bertrand, Viscount Dawson of Penn (a doctor to the Royal Family) who killed George V and the eminent naval shipbuilder and philanthropist Sir Alfred Yarrow, 1st Baronet (see Yarrow Shipbuilders), who was of partial

Sephardic Jewish descent. Lewis has said that he "went to English boarding schools and grew up around people very much like [his character] Soames and in a milieu very much like the Forsytes'".

As a child, Lewis made several visits to the US to visit relatives during summer breaks. He first decided to become an actor at the age of 16.

He was educated at the independent Ashdown House School in Forest Row, East Sussex, and at Eton College, and graduated from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in 1993.Lewis once worked as a telemarketer selling car alarms. His first television appearance was as a medical student in "Hickory Dickory Dock", a feature-length episode of Agatha Christie's Poirot, an ITV Studios TV production, broadcast in 1995. He also appeared as a rakish student in an early episode of the drama series A Touch of Frost (1996). He appeared in Robinson Crusoe (1997) as Patrick Conner.

At this time he was also working as an actor with the Royal Shakespeare Company, playing among other roles Borgheim in Adrian Noble's production of Henrik Ibsen's Little Eyolf and Posthumus Leonatus in William Shakespeare's Cymbeline. He would later go on to star in another of Ibsen's plays, as Karsten Bernick in Pillars of the Community at the National Theatre in November 2005.

He also appeared in Jonathan Kent's production of Hamlet, playing Laertes. This production was seen by Steven Spielberg, who later cast Lewis as Richard Winters in Band of Brothers (2001), the first role of several that required him to have a credible American accent.

He was in the 2000 series called Hearts and Bones as the love interest of Dervla Kirwan. Subsequently, Lewis portrayed Soames Forsyte in the ITV series The Forsyte Saga, which earned him positive reviews. He returned to the US to star in Dreamcatcher, a Lawrence Kasdan film about a man who becomes possessed by an evil alien. The character is American but when possessed he takes on a British accent. On the heels of this role, he starred in Keane as a Manhattanite with a fragile mental state who is searching for his missing daughter. Despite the film's poor box-office, Lewis's performance in the role was very well reviewed.

He played Jeffrey Archer in the TV special Jeffrey Archer: The Truth. Since 2004, he has appeared in a number of films, as well as the 2005 BBC TV adaptation of the Shakespeare comedy Much Ado About Nothing, as part of the ShakespeaRe-Told season. Lewis played the role of Yassen Gregorovich in the film Stormbreaker. In 2006, he appeared in Stephen Poliakoff's BBC drama Friends and Crocodiles. He has appeared on BBC's Have I Got News for You as guest host several times; on 10 November 2006, 1 May 2009, 18 November 2010, 27 April 9 November 2012 and 31 October 2014.

In 2008, Lewis starred as the main character Charlie Crews in the American television series Life on NBC. The show premiered in the US on 26 September 2007 and was affected by the 2007–08 Writers Guild of America strike. Only half of the first season's shows were produced. Regardless, the show won a 2008 AFI Award for best television series. Although the show received critical acclaim, when it returned the following television season, it was shuffled from night to night, and eventually cancelled by NBC to clear its time slot for The Jay Leno Show.

Lewis appeared the following year in the lead role in The Baker, a film directed by his brother, Gareth. Damian took a supporting role of Rizza in The Escapist, which he also helped produce. He led the cast in Martin Crimp's version of Molière's comedy, The Misanthrope, which opened in December 2009 at the Comedy Theatre, London. Other cast members included Tara Fitzgerald, Keira Knightley and Dominic Rowan.

Lewis played Tory Prime Minister Simon Laity in two seasons of Number 10 on BBC Radio 4.

He played Gareth, the father of an 11-year-old Liverpool F.C. fan, in the 2011 film Will.

From 2011 to 2013, Lewis had a starring role as Gunnery Sergeant Nicholas Brody in the Showtime series Homeland, for which he won a Primetime Emmy Award. In 2013, he narrated poetry for The Love Book App, an "interactive anthology of love literature developed by Allie Byrne Esiri".

In 2016 he began starring as billionaire hedge fund manager Bobby Axelrod in the Showtime series Billions. He left the show in 2021 after five seasons, but returned for half of season 7. In 2016 he appeared in the British spy film Our Kind of Traitor.

In 2024, he played a duel role as Peter Radley and his brother Will Radley, alongside Kelly Macdonald in the vampire comedy film The Radleys.