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LONDON
It's funny," Jude Law said early last year, seated in a rehearsal room deep in south London, way off the paparazzi track. "People, I think, perceive me as a film actor, which is odd because I perceive myself as an actor."
And so Law should, for one simple reason: Like virtually every British performer who achieves renown onscreen -one can count the exceptions on one hand (Helena Bonham Carter, Hugh Grant) - Law began his career on stage, establishing himself as a major theater talent well before movies came to call.
He was not even 20, for instance, when the actor, soon to turn 31, made his London stage debut as the wonderfully named Foxtrot Darling in a Philip Ridley play, "The Fastest Clock in the Universe," at northwest London's Hampstead Theater.
Stints around London at the Royal Court's Theater Upstairs ("Live Like Pigs") and the equally tiny Gate in Notting Hill ("Snow Orchid") led to Law's star-making perfin "Les Parents Terribles," which opened in April 1994 at the National Theater.
And by the time the curtain had come down on opening night,...