dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

Sinaia (Romanian pronunciation: [siˈnaja]) is a town and a mountain resort in Prahova County, Romania. It is situated in the historical region of Muntenia. The town was named after the Sinaia Monastery of 1695, around which it was built. The monastery in turn is named after the Biblical Mount Sinai. King Carol I of Romania built his summer home, Peleș Castle, near the town in the late nineteenth century.

Sinaia is about 65 kilometres (40 miles) northwest of Ploiești and 48 kilometres (30 miles) south of Brașov, in a mountainous area on the Prahova River valley, just east of the Bucegi Mountains. The town's altitude varies between 767 to 860 metres (2,516 to 2,822 feet) above sea level.

The city is a popular destination for hiking and winter sports, especially downhill skiing. Among the tourist landmarks, the most important are Peleș Castle, Pelișor Castle, Sinaia Monastery, Sinaia Casino, Sinaia train station, and the Franz Joseph and Saint Anne Cliffs. Sinaia was also the summer residence of the Romanian composer George Enescu, who stayed at the Luminiș villa.

Born in Jersey, tax paradise of the Channel Islands, in May 1983 from a broker father and a therapist mother, Henry was revealed to the public in 2002 in The Count of Monte Cristo, a screen adaptation of the classic by Alexander Dumas, in which he plays the son of Fernand Mondego. It is while he was 18 years of age that he took his first steps on Hollywood's red carpet, an experience that he found "surprising" back then, observing with a charming innocence that "the merest celebrity creates incredible attention over there. When for the first time I saw before me a wall of photographers who took photo after photo shouting ‘Henry, Henry!’ I really asked myself what I was doing there. I love attending the premieres of my films, to see the finished product, to observe how the public responds, but the effects of fame are always something disconcerting for me," he admits.

Today he is a real professional on the red carpet, but he doesn't aspire to the glitter nor the excesses of Hollywood. On the contrary, "My lifelong dream was being an actor, to act for pleasure, It was a dream that I never thought would come true, but after The Count of Monte Cristo, it came almost by accident. Without that, I would probably be enrolled in the army."

Henry, the Magnificent

Order and Discipline

In contrast to most of his young compatriots who have also achieved success in Hollywood, Henry Cavill didn't attend any of the prestigious drama schools for which London is famed, instead he found himself with the transition from a normal school desk to the film set. The school in question: Stowe, the archetypal English Boarding school with a Latin motto taken straight from the Middle Ages. Although the man is naturally rather modest, I imagined the young Henry as being a bit conceited at school. But I was surprised to discover him saying, without any irony, that he gets up every morning listening to Lady Gaga. "You know, I wasn't really the idol of the school. I was rather the short fat one who everyone told to bugger off. I had received a good education, but I wasn't prepared for life in society. It's partly why I turned to acting because it demands that you play a character, and you become that character, no one can tell you to bugger off," he remembers. "Because I was of a withdrawn nature, I was also very conscious of my personality, and when you are always the target of bullying, you ask incessantly what you did to cause it. You say ‘What am I doing wrong?’ even though it rarely is the victim's fault."

I asked him then if that type of introspection has helped him in his acting career… "That has certainly made me more aware of the actions of those around me, also very sensitive to what people notice, to what moves them. Obviously, there is childhood and its inevitable baggage of emotional crises… When you adjust to the highs and lows of the bullying inﬂicted in school, you find yourself more naturally in touch with your emotions than the average teenager."

https://henrycavill.org/en/blog/interviews/item/42-henry-the-magnificent