Sir Kenneth Charles Branagh (/ˈbrænə/ BRAN-ə; born 10 December 1960) is a British actor and filmmaker. Branagh trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and has served as its president since 2015. He has won an Academy Award, four BAFTAs, two Emmy Awards, a Golden Globe Award, and an Olivier Award. He was appointed a Knight Bachelor in the 2012 Birthday Honours. He was made a Freeman of his native city of Belfast in January 2018. In 2020, he was listed at number 20 on The Irish Times list of Ireland's greatest film actors.
Branagh has both directed and starred in several film adaptations of William Shakespeare's plays, of which he is a devoted fan, including Henry V (1989), Much Ado About Nothing (1993), Othello (1995), Hamlet (1996), Love's Labour's Lost (2000), and As You Like It (2006). He was nominated for Academy Awards for Best Actor and Best Director for Henry V and for Best Adapted Screenplay for Hamlet. He also directed Swan Song (1992), which earned an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film nomination. He also directed and starred in Dead Again (1991), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994), Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (2014), Murder on the Orient Express (2017) and Death on the Nile (2022).
He also directed the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) superhero film Thor (2011) as well as the Disney 2015 adaptation of Cinderella. He starred in the films Celebrity (1998), Wild Wild West (1999), The Road to El Dorado (2000), Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002), Valkyrie (2008), The Boat That Rocked (2009), My Week with Marilyn (2011), Dunkirk (2017), and Tenet (2020). For his semi-autobiographical comedy-drama Belfast (2021), Branagh was nominated for the Academy Awards for Best Picture and for Best Director, and he won the Award for Best Original Screenplay.
He has starred in the BBC1 series Fortunes of War (1987), the Channel 4 series Shackleton (2002), and BBC One series Wallander (2008–2016). He received the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited Series or Movie and a International Emmy Award for Best Actor for his portrayal of SS leader Reinhard Heydrich in the HBO film Conspiracy (2001). He also received a Primetime Emmy Award and a Golden Globe Award nomination for his role as Franklin D. Roosevelt in the HBO film Warm Springs (2005).
Early life
Branagh, the middle of three children (he has an older brother and a younger sister), was born on 10 December 1960 in Belfast, the son of working-class Protestant parents Frances (née Harper) and William Branagh, a plumber and joiner who ran a company that specialised in fitting partitions and suspended ceilings. He lived in the Tiger’s Bay area of the city and was educated at Grove Primary School.
In early 1970, at the age of nine, he moved with his family to Reading, Berkshire, England, to escape the Troubles. He was educated at Whiteknights Primary School and Meadway School, a local comprehensive in Tilehurst, where he appeared in school productions such as Toad of Toad Hall and Oh, What a Lovely War! At school, he acquired received pronunciation to avoid bullying. On his identity today he has said, "I feel Irish. I don't think you can take Belfast out of the boy", and he attributes his "love of words" to his Irish heritage.
He attended the amateur Reading Cine & Video Society (now called Reading Film & Video Makers) as a member and was a keen member of Progress Theatre of which he is now the patron. After disappointing A-level results in English, History and Sociology, Branagh went on to train at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. In 1980, the Principal of RADA, Hugh Cruttwell, asked Branagh to perform a soliloquy from Hamlet for Queen Elizabeth II, during one of her visits to the academy.
