Michael Fassbender Read Free

integrate with children of his own age. The principal of Fossa National School was the former Kerry Gaelic footballer, Tom Long. The 149 boy and girl pupils dressed smartly in a uniform of burgundy jumper, cream shirt, grey trousers/skirts and striped ties. To this day, Michael has many happy memories of his time there. ‘The Irish education system is really top notch,’ he was later to say. ‘At primary school I learned about the battle of Thermopylae and 300 Spartans when I was six or seven years old. There was a real love of learning language and poetry, and we were taught history and geography. It was very well rounded.’
    The Battle of Thermopylae took place in 480 BC in ancient Greece, when King Leonidas of Sparta and 1,400 men (700 Thespians, 400 Thebans and the King’s bodyguard of 300 Spartans) bravely defended the pass of Thermopylae to the death against a much greater force of invading Persians.This knowledge was to come in useful many years later when he found himself portraying a Spartan warrior caught up in the famous conflict in the movie 300 .
    Despite his grounded education, Michael still had his head in the clouds and when on his own he enjoyed daydreaming and fantasising of heroic adventures far from Killarney. Such was the strength of his imagination that when he was six years old he was convinced that he was a young Superman. At night in bed he would hear a buzzing in his ear and thought it was Kryptonite calling him to the garage – although he wasn’t sufficiently fearless to get up to investigate! Michael was delighted when his parents bought him a Superman outfit. Now there was no stopping him. They could hardly get him to take it off and had to put up with him leaping and jumping heroically around the house. And all this really made his flying take off – or so he thought.
    â€˜I would practise leaping off the couch and when my sister came in I’d say, “Look, look, I’ve flown a little further!”’ he remembers. ‘I wanted to take it [the outfit] to the swimming pool so I could practise my flying but my parents wouldn’t let me.’ And what he couldn’t do for real he recreated in the finest traditions of stage and cinema trickery. ‘I used to play this game with my cousin where he would dress up in civilian clothes – like Clark Kent – and he would stand by the side of the road and when a car came he would run behind a bush and I would come out from the bush dressed as Superman.’
    Michael has described these childhood years as ‘living in little pockets of fantasy’ – flying a spaceship, climbing trees and pretending to be the Six Million Dollar Man or the Fall Guy , two of his favourite TV shows, starring Lee Majors. Irish television imported a lot of American shows like this – CHiPs, Magnum P.I., The A-Team, Knightrider – and they were firm favourites with Michael and many other children. Michael had an uncanny knack of being able to reproduce a very accurate impression of each show’s theme tune, making guitar sounds and drumbeats with his mouth. It’s something that he can still do and which he describes as being almost OCD [obsessive compulsive disorder]. Among his party pieces these days are the remarkably realistic bird-calls that he learned as a child, the sound of a motorbike or a Formula 1 racing car and the beeping of a pedestrian crossing signal!
    In particular Michael loved Tom Selleck, who played Magnum , a private investigator living on Oahu, Hawaii, with a penchant for colourful Hawaiian shirts and shorts. And Michael yearned to grow a bushy moustache like his when he got older! ‘I loved Tom Selleck. He did such a great job on Magnum P.I.,’ he recalled. ‘I don’t think many men can carry off wearing shorts like that!’ Oddly, his childhood knowledge of the show was also to resonate with Tarantino years later.
    Inspired by such TV shows, the