Jamie Dornan emotionally recalls the deaths of his best friends just a year after the loss of his mother when he was just 16

Jamie Dornan has opened up about the death of his four best friends just a year after his mother died when he was a teenager.

The Fifty Shades Of Grey actor, 43, was just 16 when his mother Lorna died from pancreatic cancer in 1998, with the star enduring further tragedy when four of his friends died in a car crash one year later. 

He revealed the news was delivered to him by his father and sister one evening after he came back from a sailing competition.

Jamie told The Telegraph: 'At the time, hardly anyone had mobile phones, and I had no idea what was going on. This was just a year after Mum died, and I was thinking ‘what else could it be?’ My first thought was that one of our dogs had died.

'I was in deep denial at first. I remember reading about it on Teletext. There were loads of mistakes. The story was there, but it was all fractured. A couple of the names were wrong, and the spellings were wrong. 

'I remember saying to my dad, "That’s wrong. That’s not them. That’s not the boys. It can’t be." I refused to believe it. They were bleak times.'

The Irish actor went on to say playing rugby helped him manage his grief as his coach encouraged him to get back into the game after his mother died and he took a year out from school.

His remarks come after he spoke to Jay Rayner on his podcast, Out To Lunch With.., and admitted he is 'still dealing with both' tragedies two decades later. 

He said: 'Yeah my mum died when I was 16 that was obviously a life-altering, insane, horrendous thing to happen. Then four of my mates killed themselves in a car crash when I was 17.

'I had a very rough couple of years that I guess I'm still dealing with both of [those] things today, every day.'

Jamie said that he had turned to alcohol to deal with the heartbreak he had suffered.

He continued: 'But I guess they were very acute still then, and I drank a lot of everything but I had this summer where I'd go out a lot, drink, not really achieve anything.'

The star said he hadn't realised he was dealing with depression until it was pointed out in a job interview.

He said: 'I had a summer, I dropped out of university and I was doing a marketing degree and no interest in any aspect of marketing, and I thought "Well f**k this, I'm going to leave."'

 'I remember having this idea that I wanted to change and I knew I wasn't on the right path and I needed to do something else, and I got into an interview once and I was explaining what I got up to that summer, and the interviewer goes "So you're depressed" and I was like "Oh s**t yeah".'  

'I'd never seen it that way but I must have been depressed.' 

Speaking honestly about his struggles, and how he took the loss at such a young age, he admitted: 'Every kid at that age is naive, I felt like I was particularly young and naive at that time.

'I was a wee bit behind compared to my mates growing up, but I had to grow up pretty fast after that.'

In 2001, Jamie's sister encouraged him to apply for Channel 4's 'Model Behaviour', which led to his career change and his eventual move into acting.

He said: 'My sister had seen this ad for "Model Behaviour" and it was just something to do, it got me out of the house, I convinced one of my mates to come with me, he tried to call it off on the morning, he said "I'm not going".

'I said "I'm ten minutes away, you're coming with me!" That morning changed my life, If I hadn't have been able to convince him to go, I wouldn't have gone.'

Jamie's breakthrough role was as sadistic serial killer Paul Spector in successful TV series, The Fall.

He then shot to worldwide fame as businessman Christian Grey in the erotic Fifty Shades film trilogy.

The star is married to musician Amelia Warner, 43, with the couple parents to three daughters Dulcie, 11, Elva, nine, and Alberta, six.