Kenneth Branagh

• 1. Introduction

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  Kenneth 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 himself learning to speak a different way. He adopted a received pronunciation accent at school to avoid being bullied. Decades later he would say, "I feel Irish. I don't think you can take Belfast out of the boy."

  The distance between that frightened child and the person who, in 2022, won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for a black-and-white film about that same Belfast childhood is the distance this documentary will cover. How does a working-class Protestant kid from Tiger's Bay become the first person ever nominated for Academy Awards in seven different categories? How does a man shaped by Shakespeare end up directing a Marvel superhero film? And what does it mean to carry a city with you for an entire career?

• 2. Belfast to RADA

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  William Branagh, Kenneth's father, was a plumber and joiner who ran his own company fitting partitions and suspended ceilings. Frances Branagh raised three children in Tiger's Bay, and Kenneth was the middle one. Grove Primary School came first, then the family's departure in early 1970, when Kenneth was nine. In Reading he attended Whiteknights Primary School and then Meadway School in Tilehurst.

  He threw himself into local performance. He attended the amateur Reading Cine and Video Society and became a keen member of Progress Theatre, of which he is now the patron. School productions like Toad of Toad Hall and Oh, What a Lovely War shaped his early instincts. A-level results in English, history, and sociology were disappointing, but they did not stop him. He went on to train at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London.

  At RADA, a specific moment stands out. In 1980, the academy's principal Hugh Cruttwell asked Branagh to perform a soliloquy from Hamlet for Queen Elizabeth II during one of her visits. He was a student among a new wave emerging from RADA at that time, a cohort that included Jonathan Pryce, Juliet Stevenson, Alan Rickman, Anton Lesser, Bruce Payne, and Fiona Shaw.

• 3. Renaissance and Shakespeare

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  Branagh's first professional film credit was an uncredited role as a Cambridge student in Chariots of Fire in 1981. Stage recognition came faster. He won the 1982 SWET Award for Best Newcomer for his role as Judd in Julian Mitchell's Another Country, and by 1984 he was playing Henry V for the Royal Shakespeare Company in a production directed by Adrian Noble that played to sold-out audiences at the Barbican in the City of London.

  He and David Parfitt founded the Renaissance Theatre Company in 1987. Its debut season opened at Christmas that year with Twelfth Night at Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, with Richard Briers as Malvolio and Frances Barber as Viola. The score was composed by Patrick Doyle, who two years later wrote the music for Branagh's film adaptation of Henry V. The company's debut season also included Public Enemy, a play Branagh wrote himself, set in Belfast.

  The 1988 Renaissance season, co-produced with Birmingham Rep, put three Shakespeare plays on a national tour under the title Renaissance Shakespeare on the Road, then into repertory at the Phoenix Theatre in London. It featured directorial debuts by Judi Dench, Geraldine McEwan, and Derek Jacobi, who directed Branagh in Hamlet with Sophie Thompson as Ophelia. Critic Milton Shulman of the London Evening Standard wrote of Branagh that he had "the vitality of Olivier, the passion of Gielgud, the assurance of Guinness" while also lacking the magnetism of Olivier, the voice of Gielgud, and the intelligence of Guinness.

  The film Henry V arrived in 1989, adapted from that same RSC production Branagh had joined five years earlier. It earned him nominations for both Best Actor and Best Director at the Academy Awards, making him one of the youngest people to achieve that double nomination. Seven years later his four-hour Hamlet, shot entirely in 70mm film, received four Academy Award nominations and prompted critic Roger Ebert to write, "Branagh's version moved me, entertained me and made me feel for the first time at home in that doomed royal court."

• 4. Thompson, Frankenstein, and the 1990s

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  From 1989 to 1995, Branagh was married to Emma Thompson. She appeared with him across six projects including Henry V, Much Ado About Nothing, and the neo-noir Dead Again. Dead Again premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival, where it competed for the Golden Bear, and earned two Evening Standard British Film Awards for both Branagh and Thompson. The following year's Peter's Friends gathered former student friends including Thompson, Hugh Laurie, Tony Slattery, Stephen Fry, and Imelda Staunton into a British ensemble piece that critics compared favourably to The Big Chill.

  Much Ado About Nothing in 1993 brought Branagh an internationally starry cast including Denzel Washington, Kate Beckinsale, Keanu Reeves, and Michael Keaton. It premiered at Cannes, competing for the Palme d'Or. Film critic Vincent Canby of the New York Times wrote that Branagh had taken "a Shakespearean romantic comedy, the sort of thing that usually turns to mush on the screen, and made a movie that is triumphantly romantic, comic and, most surprising of all, emotionally alive."

  Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in 1994, starring Robert De Niro and Helena Bonham Carter alongside Branagh, was a different story. It premiered at the London Film Festival to negative reviews, with the New York Times calling Branagh "in over his head." During that production Branagh began an affair with Bonham Carter. Thompson divorced him in 1997. He and Bonham Carter remained in a relationship until 1999.

  His portrayal of Iago in Oliver Parker's Othello in 1995, opposite Laurence Fishburne, recovered critical standing. The New York Times praised his performance as guaranteeing the film "an immediacy that any audience will understand." In 2003, he married film art director Lindsay Brunnock, whom he had met during the making of the Channel 4 television film Shackleton the year before.

• 5. Television and Stage Returns

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  Branagh's role as SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich in the HBO film Conspiracy in 2001 stands apart in his career. The film depicts the Wannsee Conference, where Nazi officials formalised the plan for the Final Solution. Branagh acted alongside Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci. He won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie for the performance.

  Wallander began in 2008, Branagh playing the Swedish detective Kurt Wallander across four series on BBC One, the last of which aired in the UK in May and June 2016. The first series earned him the best actor award at the 35th Broadcasting Press Guild Television and Radio Awards, and his first BAFTA TV award for Best Drama Series on the 26th of April 2009. The role also brought Emmy and Crime Thriller Award nominations. He served as executive producer as well as lead actor throughout.

  Also in 2008, he appeared at Wyndham's Theatre in Tom Stoppard's new version of Chekhov's Ivanov. Multiple critics named it the performance of the year, and it won him the Critics' Circle Theatre Award for Best Male Performance. In July 2013, he co-directed Macbeth at Manchester International Festival with Rob Ashford, with Alex Kingston as Lady Macbeth and Ray Fearon as Macduff. The final performance of the completely sold-out run was broadcast to cinemas on the 20th of July as part of National Theatre Live.

• 6. Marvel, Poirot, and Belfast

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  Thor in 2011 was Branagh's return to large-scale studio filmmaking. Released on the 6th of May 2011, the film starred Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Tom Hiddleston, and Anthony Hopkins as part of Phase One of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and was both a financial and critical success. That same year Branagh portrayed Laurence Olivier in My Week with Marilyn. Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian praised Branagh for making the performance erupt "in queeny frustration at Marilyn's lateness, space-cadet vagueness, and preposterous Method acting indulgence." The role earned Branagh a Best Supporting Actor nomination at the 84th Academy Awards, where he lost to Christopher Plummer for Beginners.

  In October 2015 he announced the Kenneth Branagh Theatre Company, which presented a season of five shows at London's Garrick Theatre running from October 2015 through November 2016. The company included Judi Dench, Zoë Wanamaker, Derek Jacobi, Lily James, and Richard Madden. Three of the productions were broadcast in cinemas in partnership with Picturehouse Entertainment.

  Murder on the Orient Express in 2017 launched Branagh's Hercule Poirot series, filmed using 65mm cameras in a technique Branagh had previously reserved for his 1996 Hamlet. He has since reprised the role in Death on the Nile in 2022 and A Haunting in Venice in 2023. Christopher Nolan cast him as a Royal Navy Commander in Dunkirk in 2017, as the villain Andrei Sator in Tenet in 2020, and as Danish physicist Niels Bohr in Oppenheimer in 2023.

  Belfast, released in 2021, was shot in black-and-white with flickers of colour. Starring Jude Hill, Catriona Balfe, Jamie Dornan, Ciarán Hinds, and Judi Dench, the film won the People's Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival. It earned seven Academy Award nominations, and Branagh won for Best Original Screenplay. He became the first person ever nominated for Academy Awards in seven different categories, a record that surpassed Walt Disney, George Clooney, and Alfonso Cuarón.

• 7. Honours and Identity

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  On the 9th of November 2012, Branagh received the accolade of Knight Bachelor at Buckingham Palace. Afterward, he told a reporter that he felt "humble, elated, and incredibly lucky." The knighthood came in the 2012 Birthday Honours, specifically for services to drama and to the community in Northern Ireland.

  Freedom of the City of Belfast was conferred on the 30th of January 2018 at a ceremony in the Ulster Hall, with Lord Mayor Councillor Nuala McAllister presiding. He had received an honorary Doctorate in Literature from Queen's University of Belfast back in 1990, and an honorary Doctor of Literature from the Shakespeare Institute of the University of Birmingham in 2001. The Shakespeare Institute Library holds the archive of his Renaissance Theatre Company and Renaissance Films.

  He served as President of RADA from October 2015, succeeding Richard, Lord Attenborough. He appeared on Debrett's 2017 list of the most influential people in the UK during that tenure. He stepped down in February 2024 and was succeeded by David Harewood.

  Branagh has said he considers himself Irish, and that his "love of words" traces to his Irish heritage. Preparing for My Week with Marilyn, he listened to Laurence Olivier's dramatic reading of the Bible every morning, and he has said the experience made him "much more religious." In September 2025, it was announced that he would return to the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2026 to play Prospero in The Tempest and Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard, two roles that together span the full register of what Shakespeare and Chekhov ask of an actor.