Jason Isaacs

Biography: English actor born in Liverpool, who is best known for his performance as the villain Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter films, the brutal Colonel William Tavington in The Patriot and as lifelong criminal Michael Caffee in the internationally-broadcast American television series Brotherhood. Though most of his work has been in film and television, it also includes stage performances.

Following his more traditionally-inclined brothers, who became a doctor, a lawyer, and an accountant, Isaacs studied law at Bristol University (1982-85), but he became more actively involved in the drama society, eventually performing in over 30 plays and performing each summer at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, first with Bristol University and then, twice, with the National Student Drama Company. After graduating from Bristol he went immediately to train at London?s Central School of Speech and Drama (1985-88).

He and his partner, BBC documentary filmmaker Emma Hewitt, whom he began dating at the Central School, have lived together since 1988 and have two daughters.

Despite Isaacs? screen celebrity as Lucius Malfoy, he maintains a relatively modest, "calm, sedate and suburban" life, which he prefers to the "hideously compromised lives" of the more rich and famous: "I imagine like most of us that I?d like obscene amounts of money but the people I met and worked with who have those obscene amounts of money and have obscene amounts of fame have awful lives.

He?s been described as an "invisible star" who can still travel by the London Underground to film premières unrecognised