Kenneth Charles Branagh

Ken was born on December 10, 1960 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, the second of three children in a working-class Protestant family. They moved to Reading, England when he was 9 to escape the Troubles brewing at home. He had a bit of an identity conflict in England, which led to him adopting an English accent at school while "remaining Irish at home." As a young lad he was into sports, captaining his school's rugby and soccer team, and journalism, writing children's book reviews for the local paper. But when at 15 he saw Derek Jacobi play Hamlet he decided he wanted to be an actor.

At eighteen he was offered places at the top drama schools in Britain: the Central School of Speech and Drama and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. He chose to attend the latter, whose principal Hugh Crutwell would later serve as an acting consultant on many of his film projects. Straight out of drama school he played the second lead in the West End production of "Another Country", a performance for which he won heaps of awards, acclaim, and accolades. But it was his role as Henry V for the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) a couple of years later at age 23 that secured his position as one of the hottest new talents of the British stage. The impersonal, bureaucratic aspects of the RSC machine finally became too much for Ken, however, and he declined a second contract with the prestigious company. Instead, he and his "Another Country" buddy David Parfitt started to make plans to create a new company, which was named Renaissance and was launched in 1987 with a rather inauspicious debut, actually: the Renaissance Theatre Company's premiere production "Public Enemy"--starring, written and directed by Ken himself--opened to mostly negative reviews and charges of megalomania on the part of our young auteur. Luckily, RTC's productions of "Twelfth Night" (directed by Ken), "Much Ado About Nothing" (starring Ken), and--to a lesser degree--"Hamlet" (also starring Ken) were met with critical acclaim. Our boy was duly labeled "the next Olivier", and along with it came the prerequisite over-hype and backlash.

During the hectic period of forming Renaissance, Ken continued to work in television and film projects, one of them being the BBC mini-series "The Fortunes of War." His leading lady was Emma Thompson, and the two fell in love while shooting. They married three years later in 1989, the "Royal couple of British film". Their busy work schedules resulted in their spending a lot of time away from each other however, leading to their "growing apart", and they announced their separation on September 30, 1995.