Page 283 - FINAL_Guildhall Media Highlights 2019-2020 Coverage Book

Fox wears: wool jumper, Tommy Hilfiger; linen-blend jacket, and matching trousers, both Giorgio
Armani CREDIT: NIK HARTLEY
It’s just as well Fox thinks actors are ‘the most wonderful, glorious breed of people’, because he
couldn’t move for them as a child. He was named after Fred Zimmerman, who directed his father
in The Day of the Jackal, and as a boy was ‘a goody two shoes, head boy of my prep school, prefect
at my boarding school [Bryanston], and when I did get into trouble I curried such good favour with
the teachers that I got away with it’.

Well, that boy sounds insufferable. A show-off, too? ‘Not early on. My sister might disagree,
though.’

He was raised between London and the family home in Kimmeridge Bay, Dorset. The house there
still has no internet, no television, and water comes from a well in the garden. But it was fun, all
making dens and ‘imaginative bucolia’ with his best friend Henry, who is now his housemate in
north London.

Fox never wanted to be anything other than an actor. His first screen appearance was aged seven,
as an extra in the 1997 TV adaptation of Rebecca that starred Emilia opposite family friend Charles
Dance.

Even earlier, he joined his parents as they performed in touring productions. Once, when he was
three, he watched his father on stage in My Fair Lady. The little Freddie waved, mid-show, to his
dad from the balcony and didn’t get one back. He was livid. The next night he was in again, and
Edward worked a wave into a scene. ‘Except this time I was fast asleep.’