Ewan McGregor

• 1. Introduction

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  Ewan Gordon McGregor was born on the 31st of March 1971 in Perth, Scotland, and grew up in the nearby town of Crieff. He left school at 16 to work as a stagehand at Perth Theatre. A few years later, still a student at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, he landed a leading role in a Dennis Potter television series before he had even graduated. That combination of restless ambition and unconventional timing would mark his entire career.

  What drives a Scottish teenager from a small town to walk off a school stage and onto a film set? How does a young man raised by two teachers become one of the most recognisable faces in global cinema? And how does an actor known for heroin addicts and Jedi knights become equally at home on a 22,345-mile motorcycle journey across the world?

• 2. Roots and Training

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  Crieff, a small town in Perthshire, produced an unlikely acting dynasty. McGregor's mother, Carol Diane, taught at Crieff High School and later served as deputy head teacher at Kingspark School in Dundee. His father, Jim McGregor, taught physical education and worked as a careers master at Morrison's Academy, the independent school where Ewan himself was educated.

  The family connection to performance ran deeper than McGregor's own ambitions. His uncle, Denis Lawson, was already an established actor, and his older brother Colin, born in 1969, became a Tornado GR4 pilot in the Royal Air Force. McGregor attended Morrison's Academy but left at 16, working backstage at Perth Theatre before studying a foundation drama course at Kirkcaldy College of Technology.

  At 18, he moved to London to enrol at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Six months before his graduation, he was cast in the leading role of Dennis Potter's six-part Channel 4 series Lipstick on Your Collar, which broadcast in 1993. That same year he appeared alongside Rachel Weisz in the BBC adaptation of Scarlet and Black. His first film role came the following year in Bill Forsyth's Being Human, and his second, Shallow Grave, earned him an Empire Award and began a fruitful working relationship with director Danny Boyle.

• 3. Trainspotting and Stardom

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  Mark Renton, the heroin addict at the centre of Irvine Welsh's novel Trainspotting, was the role that made McGregor internationally known. Danny Boyle's 1996 film adaptation placed McGregor at the heart of a story that was raw, darkly comic, and unlike anything mainstream British cinema had recently produced. The performance announced a new kind of Scottish actor on the world stage.

  Just as that recognition settled, McGregor was cast in a role of an entirely different magnitude. George Lucas selected him to play the young Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Star Wars prequel trilogy, released between 1999 and 2005. The role had an added layer of family history: his uncle Denis Lawson had played Wedge Antilles in the original trilogy, and the original Obi-Wan had been Alec Guinness. McGregor later said that working mostly against green screens made the prequels difficult, and that the dialogue was "not exactly Shakespeare". He also described the negative public reaction to the films as hard to bear. Nevertheless, his own performance drew consistent praise even when the broader films did not.

  Between those two landmark projects, McGregor worked steadily across genres. He played rockstar Curt Wild in Todd Haynes's Velvet Goldmine in 1998, and appeared in Ridley Scott's war film Black Hawk Down in 2001 as John Grimes. His role as the young poet Christian in Moulin Rouge! that same year, opposite Nicole Kidman, earned him his first Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor in a Motion Picture Musical or Comedy. In 2003, he took two very different dramatic turns: the younger Edward Bloom in Tim Burton's critically acclaimed Big Fish, and an amoral drifter in the drama Young Adam alongside Tilda Swinton.

• 4. The Stage and the Screen

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  From June 2005 to April 2007, McGregor appeared in the Donmar Warehouse revival of Guys and Dolls, playing the leading role of Sky Masterson alongside Jane Krakowski, Douglas Hodge, and Jenna Russell. The production transferred to the Piccadilly Theatre in London's West End. His performance won the LastMinute.com award for Best Actor in 2005 and earned him a Laurence Olivier Award nomination for Best Actor in a Musical in 2007.

  Less than a year later, he was back at the Donmar Warehouse for a production of Othello, playing Iago from December 2007 to February 2008, with Chiwetel Ejiofor as Othello and Kelly Reilly as Desdemona. He reprised the role on BBC Radio 3 in May 2008.

  His Broadway debut came in 2014 in a production of Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing at the American Airlines Theatre, where he played Henry alongside Maggie Gyllenhaal and Cynthia Nixon. His first film as a director, American Pastoral in 2016, in which he also starred, extended the range of roles he was willing to take on behind the camera as well as in front of it.

  The period from 2017 onwards brought some of his most acclaimed television work. His dual performance as brothers Ray and Emmit Stussy in the third season of Fargo won him the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Miniseries or Television Film at the 75th Golden Globe Awards. Four years later, his portrayal of American fashion designer Halston in the Netflix miniseries Halston, a project he also executive-produced alongside Ryan Murphy, won him the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor. The series was based on Steven Gaines's biography Simply Halston. In September 2024, McGregor received his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

• 5. Two Wheels Around the World

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  In mid-April 2004, McGregor and his best friend Charley Boorman set off from London on BMW R1150GS motorcycles. By the end of July they had reached New York City, having travelled through central Europe, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Russia, Canada, and the United States. The cumulative distance was 22,345 miles, or 35,960 kilometres. A cameraman named Claudio von Planta and a support crew accompanied them throughout. The journey became the basis of a television series and a bestselling book, both called Long Way Round.

  In 2007, the same team reunited for a second journey, this time from John o' Groats in Scotland to Cape Town in South Africa, riding from May until August. That trip yielded the book and series Long Way Down, and included work McGregor and Boorman did for UNICEF in Africa along the way.

  The 2019 trip marked a departure from the earlier journeys in one notable respect: McGregor and Boorman rode Harley-Davidson LiveWire electric motorcycles from Patagonia, Argentina to California, United States, between September and December. The resulting 2020 series was called Long Way Up.

  For a fourth journey in 2024, McGregor chose a 1974 Moto Guzzi Eldorado police motorcycle, while Boorman rode a BMW R75/5. That trip was documented in the 2025 series Long Way Home. Across these four expeditions, the journeys served a dual function: they were adventures in their own right and windows into McGregor's long-standing charitable commitments, particularly his work with UNICEF UK, which began in 2004.

• 6. Philanthropy and Public Life

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  McGregor has served as an ambassador for UNICEF UK since 2004, a commitment that grew directly out of the Long Way Round journey, during which he and Boorman witnessed UNICEF programmes in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Mongolia. His work extended to a 2012 BBC documentary, Ewan McGregor: Cold Chain Mission, in which he travelled by motorbike, boat, plane, and foot to deliver vaccines to children in remote parts of India, Nepal, and the Republic of Congo.

  In June 2015, he read Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Match Girl" for the GivingTales app, a children's fairy tales project in aid of UNICEF, alongside figures including Sir Roger Moore, Stephen Fry, Dame Joan Collins, Joanna Lumley, and Sir Michael Caine. He also hosted the annual Hollywood gala for the GO Campaign in 2009 and 2010, and has worked with the Children's Hospice Association Scotland.

  His political views have been equally public. He was an outspoken critic of Brexit and initially opposed Scottish independence in the 2014 referendum, though he later said he would have voted for independence the day after the United Kingdom left the European Union. By 2020 he was openly supporting Scottish independence. He became a naturalised US citizen after 2016 specifically to vote in the 2020 presidential election. In 2017, he declined to appear on Piers Morgan's television programme after Morgan made disparaging remarks about participants in the 2017 Women's March. In October 2023, he signed the Artists4Ceasefire open letter during the Gaza war. Empire magazine placed him at number 36 on their list of the top 100 movie stars of all time in 1997, and a 2004 BBC poll named him the fourth most influential person in British culture.