On his journey from Birmingham boy to Hollywood star David Harewood has shared the silver screen with Leonardo Di Caprio and earned an MBE for services to drama.

But the Homeland actor says his finest moment came away from the cameras and the red carpet.

Seven years ago David received a telephone call from the Anthony Nolan Trust. Someone somewhere had the blood cancer leukaemia and was in desperate need of a bone marrow transplant to help them beat the disease.

David was the closest match.

David, 48, says: The call came completely out of the blue, I felt like I had won the lottery. It was like a giant finger in the sky pointing me out and saying, its you. I immediately wanted to do whatever I could to help.

The transplant was initially scheduled for a few months later, but those plans had to be hastily revised while RADA-trained actor David was in Romania filming The Last Enemy for BBC One.

I had another call to say my recipient had taken a turn for the worse, says David, who is best known for playing CIA counter-terrorism chief David Este in the hit US spy drama Homeland.

They couldnt wait until I finished filming as they might not make it. They needed my stem cells urgently, it was horrifying.

Thankfully David was due a break in filming, which he used to flew straight home to the UK. A nurse then visited him at home every morning for four days, giving him injections to boost his stem cell production.

On the fifth day David went to Harley Street in London to have his stem cells harvested. He was hooked up to a machine that took blood from one arm, filtered out the vital stems cells that would replace his recipients bone marrow and fed the blood back into his body through a needle in the other arm.

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Homeland star David Harewood on donating bone marrow: 'They needed my stem cells urgently - it was horrifying'