Copyright 2004 Financial Times Information
All rights reserved
Global News Wire - Europe Intelligence Wire
Copyright 2004 The Sunday Independent
The Sunday Independent (Ireland)

EAMONN O'HANLON

THE Irish actor seen swimming to New York in an acclaimed Guinness advertisement is to star in a new expose - of Winnie the Pooh.

Kerryman Michael Fassbender made a splash earlier this year with the release of the Guinness commercial, The Quarrel, which shows him swimming the Atlantic to make up with a pal over a pint of the black stuff in a Manhattan bar.

Now he is about to start work on TV movie A Bear Called Winnie, which promises to tell the true story of the world's most famous bear and its creator, AA Milne.

In the movie, Michael, 27, who made his name in Steven Spielberg's Band of Brothers, plays Canadian soldier Harry Colbourn, who first adopted the orphaned black bear cub that inspired AA Milne to write his famous Pooh stories.

Colbourn spotted the cub while on leave from the Canadian army in 1914 in Ontario and named it in honour of his hometown of Winnipeg.

It was years later, after he had brought the bear to England and loaned it to London Zoo, that AA Milne and his son Christopher Robin entered the story.

"The film will be quite an eye-opener," an insider said.

"Most people think Winnie the Pooh was English, but he was as Canadian as maple syrup. AA Milne's stories show him frolicking in the English countryside. The truth is that the bear spent most of his life in captivity."

Michael, who was born in Germany but grew up in Killarney, is fast becoming one of Ireland's most in-demand young actors. He recently played Guy Fawkes in Jimmy McGovern's Gunpowder, Treason and Plot and will soon be seen taking the lead role in British TV series Who Killed Charlie Bravo, as well as US drama Hex for Columbia TV.