Movies

Jeremy William Fredric Smith (born 18 June 1990), known professionally as Jeremy Irvine, is an English actor who made his film debut in the epic war film War Horse (2011). In 2012, he portrayed Philip "Pip" Pirrip in the film adaptation of Great Expectations.

Irvine earned a reputation as a Method actor after he went for two months without food, losing around two stone (13 kg), and performed his own torture scene stunts in The Railway Man (2013). He has since starred in The Woman in Black: Angel of Death (2015), and portrayed Daniel Grigori in the direct-to-video film adaptation of the young adult novel Fallen (2016), as well as young Sam in Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again (2018). In 2019, he starred as John Randolph Bentley in the USA Network television series Treadstone.

Early life
Irvine was born Jeremy William Fredric Smith on 18 June 1990 in Gamlingay, Cambridgeshire, where he was raised. His mother, Bridget Smith, is a Liberal Democrat councillor on (and latterly leader of) the South Cambridgeshire District Council, and his father, Chris Smith, is an engineer.

He has two younger brothers, one of whom portrayed a younger version of Irvine's Pip in Great Expectations. All three boys have diabetes. Irvine's stage surname was his grandfather's first name. His great-grandfather, Sir Ralph Lilley Turner, wrote the quotation used as the inscription on London's Gurkha Memorial.

Irvine started acting at age 16. He says his drama teacher inspired him to pursue acting: "I never fitted in, which led me to acting. I was looking for something different." He played Romeo along with other main roles in plays whilst attending Bedford Modern School, followed by a run with the National Youth Theatre.

After completing a one-year foundation course at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA), which he attended with Sam Claflin, Irvine spent two years posting his CV through letterboxes in an effort to get acting work. He almost gave up acting for good just before he got his big break in War Horse. In an interview with CBS News while promoting Great Expectations, he described this as the lowest point of his life and revealed that he considered taking a different career path: "I'd kind of hit rock bottom and really did think this was stupid and I just wasted three or four years of my life. My dad wanted me to get a job being a welder. At the company he was at, he was an engineer. I was very very close to doing that."