Kenneth Branagh

Kenneth Branagh (born December 10, 1960, Belfast, Northern Ireland) is an Irish-born English actor, director, and writer who is best known for his film adaptations of Shakespearean plays.

At age nine Branagh moved with his family from Northern Ireland to London. He began acting in school plays and graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1981. Six weeks later he made his professional stage debut. In 1984 he joined the prestigious Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), where he received acclaim for his performances in Hamlet and Henry V. Often compared to Laurence Olivier (whom he would later portray), Branagh was noted for his magnetic and often whimsical performances. In 1987 he left the RSC to cofound the Renaissance Theatre Company, for which he served as actor, writer, and director.

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In 1989 Branagh brought Henry V to the screen. The movie received critical acclaim, and Branagh was nominated for an Academy Award for best director and another for best actor. Emma Thompson, whom Branagh married in 1989, costarred. The two appeared together in many film and stage productions until their divorce in 1995. In 1992 Branagh directed the Oscar-nominated short film Swan Song, which was based on a play by Anton Chekhov and starred John Gielgud.

Credited with making Shakespeare accessible to the masses, Branagh also acted in and directed In the Bleak Midwinter (1995; U.S. title A Midwinter’s Tale), about a production of Hamlet staged in a local church, as well as film versions of Much Ado About Nothing (1993); Hamlet (1996), for which he received an Oscar nomination for adapted screenplay; and Love’s Labour’s Lost (2000). In 1995 he appeared as Iago in the film Othello, and in 2006 he directed the film As You Like It. He also directed and acted in the motion pictures Dead Again (1991) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994).

Early in his career Branagh appeared in several television productions, including The Lady’s Not for Burning (1987) and Look Back in Anger (1989), both movies adapted from plays, and the miniseries Fortunes of War (1987), based on novels by Olivia Manning. He subsequently starred as Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton in the miniseries Shackleton (2002) and as Franklin D. Roosevelt in the miniseries Warm Springs (2005). In the crime series Wallander (2008–16), which adapted the work of novelist Henning Mankell, Branagh played the title role.

Branagh’s later film roles included supporting turns in Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002) and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002), a film adaptation of J.K. Rowling’s popular children’s book. His appearance as Olivier in My Week with Marilyn (2011), which dramatized events behind the scenes of the 1957 film The Prince and the Showgirl, earned him an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor. During this time Branagh continued to direct, and his credits included Sleuth (2007), a remake of the 1972 film about a mystery author who gets revenge on his wife’s younger lover, and Thor (2011), an adaptation of a comic book about the eponymous Norse god. In 2014 he helmed the action thriller Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, in which he also appeared as a vicious Russian banker.

Branagh later directed Cinderella (2015), an adaptation of the classic fairy tale. In 2017 he portrayed a British naval commander in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, a World War II drama about the evacuation of Allied troops from France. That same year he directed and starred as the renowned detective Hercule Poirot in Murder on the Orient Express, based on Agatha Christie’s 1933 novel. He then directed and starred in All Is True (2018), which centres on Shakespeare’s final years.

In 2020 Branagh helmed Artemis Fowl, a family adventure based on the popular fantasy series by Eoin Colfer, and he appeared in Nolan’s sci-fi thriller Tenet. The following year Branagh earned acclaim for Belfast, which he wrote and directed. Inspired by his own childhood, the drama is set in Belfast during the early years of the Troubles. It was nominated for numerous Academy Awards, and, with nods for best picture (he served as a producer) and original screenplay, Branagh became the first person to receive Oscar nominations in seven different categories. He also earned his second nod for best director. He ultimately won an Academy Award for his screenplay. In 2022 Branagh reprised the role of Poirot in Death on the Nile, which he also directed. Later that year he portrayed Boris Johnson in the miniseries This England, a docudrama about the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom. He made his third appearance in a Nolan film in Oppenheimer (2023), a historical epic about the development of the atomic bomb in which Branagh portrayed renowned physicist Niels Bohr.

Branagh wrote several books about the making of his films, and his autobiography, Beginning, was published in 1989. He was knighted in 2012.