Curated playlist
Actors awarded knighthoods
- Charlie ChaplinCharlie Chaplin was sent to a workhouse twice before the age of nine. By 14, he had taken his own mother to an infirmary, watched her return to a mental asylum, and slept rough in the streets of London while searching for food. Within a…
- Ian McKellenIan McKellen was nine years old when his main Christmas present arrived: a fold-away wood and bakelite Victorian theatre from Pollocks Toy Theatres, complete with cardboard scenery and wire-pushed cut-outs of Cinderella and of Laurence…
- Michael CaineMaurice Joseph Micklewhite was born on the 14th of March 1933 at St Olave's Hospital in Rotherhithe, a working-class district of London, the son of a fish market porter. By the time he died his stage name Michael Caine would appear in more…
- John GielgudOn the evening of the 20th of October 1953, John Gielgud was arrested in Chelsea for cruising for sex in a public lavatory, an act that was then a crime in Britain. He had been knighted only months earlier in the Coronation Honours. He was…
- Kenneth BranaghKenneth Branagh was nine years old when his family packed up and left Belfast, fleeing the early violence of the Troubles. They settled in Reading, in Berkshire, and the boy who had grown up in the Tiger's Bay area of north Belfast found…
- Laurence OlivierLaurence Kerr Olivier was born on the 22nd of May 1907 in Dorking, Surrey, the youngest child of a nomadic Church of England clergyman who never quite found a permanent post. By the time he was ten years old, Ellen Terry had written in her…
- Daniel Day-LewisDaniel Day-Lewis was born on the 29th of April 1957 in Kensington, London, to a poet and an actress. Before most people had ever heard his name, he was already inhabiting other people's lives so completely that crew members on film sets…
- Jonathan PryceJonathan Pryce was born John Price on the 1st of June 1947 in Carmel, Flintshire, the son of a former coal miner who ran a small grocery shop. He grew up Welsh Presbyterian, attended Holywell Grammar School, and briefly trained to be a…
- Ringo StarrRingo Starr was born on the 7th of July 1940 at 9 Madryn Street in Dingle, one of the oldest and poorest inner-city districts in Liverpool. His real name is Richard Starkey, and he grew up in a neighbourhood where, as his childhood…
- Alec GuinnessAlec Guinness walked onto a stage for the first time on his 20th birthday, the 2nd of April 1934, earning a single pound a week and permitted to utter just two lines. By the time he left the stage for good, on the 30th of May 1989, he had…
- Ben KingsleyBen Kingsley was born Krishna Pandit Bhanji on the 31st of December 1943, in Snainton, North Riding of Yorkshire. He carries within him a world of contradictions: a Quaker raised by a Gujarati Khoja father who practised Ismaili Shia Islam,…
- Idris ElbaIdris Elba was born Idrissa Akuna Elba on the 6th of September 1972 in the London Borough of Hackney, the only child of a Sierra Leonean father who worked at the Ford Dagenham plant and a Ghanaian mother. He grew up in Hackney and East…
- Patrick StewartPatrick Stewart grew a moustache for the role of Macbeth, and when he looked in the mirror just before going on stage, he saw his father's face staring straight back at him. His father, Alfred Stewart, was a regimental sergeant major in…