Sir Kenneth Charles Branagh 

(/ˈbrænə/; born 10 December 1960)[1] 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 been nominated for five Academy Awards and has won three BAFTAs,
two Emmy Awards and a Golden Globe Award. He was appointed a Knight Bachelor in the 2012
Birthday Honours and knighted on 9 November 2012.[2] He was made a Freeman of his native city of
Belfast in January 2018.[3] In 2020, he was listed at number 20 on The Irish Times list of Ireland's
greatest film actors.[4]
Branagh has both directed and starred in several film adaptations of William Shakespeare's plays,
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 has starred in the television series Fortunes of War (1987), Shackleton (2002),
and Wallander (2008–2016) and in the films Celebrity (1998), Wild Wild West (1999), The Road to El
Dorado (2000), as SS leader Reinhard Heydrich in Conspiracy (2001), Harry Potter and the
Chamber of Secrets (2002), Warm Springs (2005), as Major General Henning von
Tresckow in Valkyrie (2008), The Boat That Rocked (2009), as Sir Laurence Olivier in My Week with
Marilyn (2011), Dunkirk (2017), and Tenet (2020). He won an International Emmy
Award for Wallander and a Primetime Emmy Award for Conspiracy, and was nominated for
the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for My Week with Marilyn.
Branagh directed and starred in the romantic thriller Dead Again (1991), the horror film Mary
Shelley's Frankenstein (1994), and the action thriller Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (2014). He directed
and starred as Hercule Poirot in the mystery drama adaptations of Agatha Christie's Murder on the
Orient Express (2017) and Death on the Nile (2022). He also directed such films as Swan
Song (1992), which earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Live Action Short Film, The
Magic Flute (2006), Sleuth (2007), the Marvel superhero film Thor (2011), the live-action
adaptation of Disney's Cinderella (2015), Artemis Fowl (2020) and the semi-autobiographical
comedy-drama Belfast (2021).
Branagh has narrated numerous documentary series, including Cold War (1998), Walking with
Dinosaurs (1999), The Ballad of Big Al (2001), Walking with Beasts (2001), Walking with
Monsters (2005), and World War 1 in Colour (2005).