Culture

‘Nanny McPhee’ child star Raphael Coleman dies at 25

11/02/2020

Raphael Coleman, who starred as Eric in the 2005 Emma Thompson movie “Nanny McPhee,” died suddenly last Friday at the age of 25. He collapsed suddenly during a run without previous health concerns according to Mirror.

His stepfather, Carsten Jensen, shared the news on Facebook, noting that Coleman “collapsed without prior health problems in the middle of a trip and could not be restored.” Coleman’s mother, Liz Jensen, added on Twitter, “Rest in peace my beloved son Raphael Coleman, aka Iggy Fox. He died doing what he loved, working for the noblest cause of all. His family could not be prouder. Let’s celebrate all he achieved in his short life and cherish his legacy.”

Coleman quit acting not long after the film came out and he went on to devote himself to environmental activism.

Coleman was 11 when the high-profile family film, which also starred Colin Firth, was released. He and several other actors in the cast were singled out for recognition at the Young Artist Awards, whose past winners include Leonardo DiCaprio, Regina King and Mila Kunis. He earned his only other acting credits in 2009, when he appeared in horror film It’s Alive, the Milla Jovovitch thriller The Fourth Kind and a comedy short, Edward’s Turmoil, for which he won an award for recognition as the Best Young Actor at the Brussels Short Film Festival.

He quit his acting career to study zoology.

As an adult, Coleman went by the name Iggy Fox and worked with the group Extinction Rebellion, whose members define it as an “international movement that uses non-violent civil disobedience in an attempt to halt mass extinction and minimise the risk of social collapse.”

Fox wrote in an undated essay that he had left a career in science to work with the organization.

“After seven years studying, researching and protecting nature as a wildlife conservationist, I stopped fieldwork and deferred an MSc in order to rebel full-time,” he wrote. “Because no matter how many surveys I ran, how many turtle nests I protected, or how many young people I educated about ‘sustainability’, the seas kept rising, forests kept burning, plastic kept clogging the beaches, and our data kept showing that wildlife was being decimated.”

The internet memorialized Coleman, for both his movie work and for his generous efforts to save the environment.

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