Once upon a time, in the verdant county of Kent, in the city of Canterbury, England, a boy was christened Orlando Jonathan Blanchard Bloom, after seventeenth-century composer Orlando Gibbons. Alas, this Orlando, being from Canterbury, where Geoffrey Chaucer based his famously unfinished tales, would soon take a more dramatic turn with his life. Having excelled in local plays at an early age, he moved to London at sixteen to attend drama school, a journey that not only transformed the boy into a man, but also into a star born for epics on the silver screen.

In London, he met the wizard behind The Lord of the Rings, who cast Bloom as the elfin Legolas Greenleaf. Soon, our hero was a prince of filmdom, performing alongside the kings: with Viggo Mortensen in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean, and Brad Pitt in Troy. He starred on his own in Kingdom of Heaven, a typically Orlando-esque adventure about a common man who serves a doomed king, falls in love with a forbidden queen, and rises to knighthood. Herewith, Bloom tells the equally captivating story of his own fabled life in Canterbury and London.

Friday
Culture
In Canterbury, there is a place called the Canterbury Tales, which is like a little walk-through museum where you see all the different characters described. The mannequins are all dressed up, and there are even the sounds and smells of the times. It's quaint. Often, I'll dream of walking through streets in England that I used to walk. St. Thomas Hill in Canterbury is one that was locked in my head. It actually led to my old school, and I grew up on that hill. We had a house on St. Thomas Hill.

But growing up in Canterbury, the cathedral was always right in my backyard, and for different school functions we would go to the cathedral. And at Christmas my mom loved for us to go and sing carols at the cathedral. I think that sort of space instills a sense of awe and history and imagination. All of the history that went along with Canterbury – being brought up there, it became a part of who I was. I suppose it may have had some lasting impression that has inspired me to do the historical, epic kind of stories.

London orientation
I moved to London to finish my studies and go to drama school. My dad drove me up, and I stayed with family friends. On my first night, I put on London radio stations. I remember waking up my first morning and thinking about all my friends in Canterbury who were probably at the same boarding school, and, wow, here I was listening to KISS FM. In Canterbury, it was like invective radio. And I remember thinking, Wow, this is cool. I'm in London and I'm listening to great music on London radio. I had dreams of being an actor, and the National Youth Theatre, which is an amateur dramatics company based in London, was something that I joined initially. I also finished my education at the Fine Arts College in North London, did theatre, photography and sculpture – subjects that weren't available to me at school in Kent. I felt that if I wanted to be an actor, London was the best place to start. I lived there for seven years until I left to do Lord of the Rings.

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Excerpted from Celebrated Weekends: The stars' guide to the most exciting destinations in the world by Mark Seal. Copyright 2007 by Mark Seal. Excerpted with permission from Rutledge Hill Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced except with permission in writing from the publisher.