Early Life
Simon John Charles Le Bon was the first born son of John Le Bon and Ann-Marie, followed by two further sons, David and Jonathan. He is descended from exiled French Huguenot stock. His mother encouraged his artistic talent when he was six years old by entering him in a screen test for a Persil washing powder TV advert; he won and starred as the little boy with the off-white shirt, but had no spoken lines.
He was a member of the local church choir from a young age, but was also trained as an actor. Simon went to Pinner County Grammar School, the same school that Elton John attended some years earlier. He worked as a theatre porter at Northwick Park Hospital Accident and Casualty, and also auditioned for a punk band at Harrow College. He appeared in a few television commercials and also in several theatre productions including Tom Brown's Schooldays in the West End of London. He worked on a kibbutz – an Israeli collective community – in the Negev desert in Israel in 1978, and then returned to England to study drama at the University of Birmingham before meeting the fledgling band Duran Duran in 1980.
Read more about this topic: Simon Le Bon
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“In the early days of the world, the Almighty said to the first of our race “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread”; and since then, if we except the light and the air of heaven, no good thing has been, or can be enjoyed by us, without having first cost labour.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“Inexpressibly beautiful appears the recognition by man of the least natural fact, and the allying his life to it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)