Domino Harvey Biography

Domino Harvey was born on August 7, 1969, in Hammersmith, London, as the firstborn child of popular British actor Laurence Harvey. Her mother was Paulene Stone, who married Harvey a few years after giving birth to Domino, while Laurence was having an extra-marital affair with her.

Laurence passed away from cancer in 1973 and this led Domino to be raised by Paulene, who moved to Belgravia, a high profile area in London. Ever since she was little, Domino was a tomboy.

She also grew up to be an extremely extrovert and mischievous little kid. She was a troublemaker in her school and got expelled from many of her schools. She was sent to a boarding school in London, while her mother moved to the United States to live with her new husband. Staying all alone somehow further contributed to her increasingly aggressive personality. By the� time she was ten years old, she began getting into fights with other boys from her classes.

Domino Harvey was eventually enrolled into the Dartington Hall School, from where she learned martial arts. She describes those few years as the best time of her teen years. She somehow graduated high school. However, despite getting the best quality education, she had not decided what to pursue after school. Hence, she decided to walk on her mother’s footsteps and tried doing modelling.

Fresh out of the high school, she entered into modelling and was signed by the Ford Modeling Agency. She also enrolled into the Lee Strasberg Institute in New York to learn acting, but she did not find it fulfilling. While she was making enough through modelling, she was not happy and stated that she did not like taking orders from ‘idiots’.

In the next few years, she tried different careers. She sold t-shirts in the Kensington Market and also worked as a DJ at a few nightclubs. Additionally she also served as a manager at a night club for a brief period of time in the 1980s. She later tried her hand at acting, but nothing suited her and she decided to move back with her mother and step-father to try all over again.

Domino Harvey moved in with her mother at their Beverly Hills Mansion, but after spending some time there, she moved by herself to the mountains located just outside San Diego, where she began working at a ranch. It was there that she became accustomed to weapons such as big guns and knives.

She also worked briefly as a fire-fighter in Boulevard, California, and always carried a ten inch long hunting dagger, earning the name Dagger Bailey’s. She served as a volunteer fire-fighter for about a year. After that, she took training in EMT, emergency medical technician and took a few courses in fire science as well in the early 1990s. However, nothing seemed to be going her way.

In 1993, Domino Harvey applied in the Los Angeles Fire Department to seek permanent employ there, but she failed to enter the department. She was running out of ideas to approach her career. Some of her friends were into bounty hunting and she liked the idea of becoming a bounty hunter herself. She took a short course to become a bail recovery agent, also known as a bounty hunter.

She achieved immense success as a bounty hunter. She had a small gang of her own and they all worked together on luring the suspects out. Her attractive appearance and the unassuming personality was her biggest weapon, which she used to gain access into people’s homes and to seek out the fugitives hidden there.

Upon getting the leads, she also visited many Los Angeles nightclubs to lure the suspects into a ‘honey trap’ and once they came outside, her colleagues would be waiting for them. She also impersonated charity workers to catch many of the suspects.

She was one of the very few women who worked as a bounty hunter and hence, initially, she was assigned to catch only petty thieves and drug addicts. But by the mid-1990s, as she became furthermore experienced, she began catching murder suspects as well.

She later told the media that she never stepped out of her house without her pistol and a knife, as she was working among dangerous men. Even in her house, she had a massive collection of knives, daggers and swords. She worked with the Celes King Bail Bond Agency and her boss there named Ed Martinez publicly praised her bravado.

She however later mentioned that the job did not pay her good enough but it was enough to get by. However, she also said that her job filled her with excitement and that she was happy working there.

She lived in her mother’s home at Beverly Hills and operated from there. As she was the daughter of a popular British actor, she slowly became popular among the media houses and as a result, many publications conducted her interview. Filmmaker Tony Scott came across some of the articles written on her and approached her to buy the rights to her life’s story.

Very soon, they became good friends and Tony began visiting her more often. Eventually, he also began accompanying her during her work and learned a great deal about how bounty hunters went about their job in real lives.

This further inspired Tony to come up with a film on Domino’s life. In 1997, the rights to the story were officially purchased by Tony.

The film titled ‘Domino’ was released in 2005, and Tony based the story mostly on his conversations with Domino he had recorded on a tape. During the initial phases of the shoot, Domino was there on sets, but eventually she stopped visiting it. Speculations circled around whether she was unhappy with her portrayal. Upon the film’s release, it was pinpointed that several aspects of her life were fictionalised. She passed away midway through the production of the film and the ending of the film was changed accordingly.

Ever since her teen years, Domino Harvey had been a drinker and eventually she began taking hard drugs. She became an alcoholic and consumed drugs such as cocaine and heroin. Tony Scott claimed that on most of the occasions, the bounty hunters would keep the drugs they confiscated to themselves and many of them were hard users, including Domino.

In 1997, she entered a drugs rehabilitation center located in Hawaii and lived there for two years. Most of her stay there was funded by her mother. Upon returning to LA in 2001, she tried getting her job as a bounty hunter back, but her previous employer did not take her in.

In 2003, Domino Harvey was arrested over the charges of having possession of crystal meth. Later in 2005, she was taken in by the authorities for the charges of drugs trafficking. She kept denying the charges on her and was put into house arrest.

She was found unconscious on the night of June 27, 2005, in her home. She was taken to a hospital where she was pronounced dead. The cause of her demise was found to be overdose of a painkiller.