Kenneth Branagh
Kenneth Branagh
Sir Kenneth Charles Branagh is a Northern Irish actor, director, producer, and screenwriter. Branagh trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. He has directed or starred in several film adaptations of William Shakespeare's plays, including Henry V, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Hamlet, Love's Labour's Lost, and As You Like It...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth10 December 1960
CityBelfast, Northern Ireland
CountryIreland
I'll tell you what I'm grateful for, and that's the clarity of understanding that the most important things in life are health, family and friends, and the time to spend on them.
I have a pathetic urge at some stage in my life to be able to pull out my wallet and pull out a little card on which it would say, 'Kenneth Branagh, artistic director.'
I think A Midsummer Night's Dream would be terrific because of the transformations that occur. Or The Tempest, things like that. Extraordinary larger than life or supernatural element.
Life is about making plans from which you deviate, almost always. If you are lucky, you do come up with a plan.
I've lived a lot of my life in London, so I often feel that I am a Londoner.
In 'Henry V,' the story of the assumption of true and responsible leadership by Henry I think is hard-won. He has to lose friends; he has to risk his life.
Lighten up, just enjoy life, smile more, laugh more, and don't get so worked up about things.
Frankenstein feels like an ancient tale, the kind of traditional story that appears in many other forms. It appeals to something very primal, but it's also about profound things, the very nature of life and death and birth - about, essentially, a man who is resisting the most irresistible fact of all, that we will be shuffling off this mortal coil.
I think people half know it but don't know it, you know? I think when you see the whole thing, there's just such a slew of new things there. You see them in a different light.
We wanted to do something that was a little closer to our own century and yet also was a world in which you could believe that people spoke in a slightly different way.
What I've found about 'Cinderella' is that what it provokes in an audience is really extraordinary. It appears to be a deceptively simple tale, but I've heard nothing but people drawing all different things out of it.
'Thor' has got several big battles in it, a reckless, headstrong young hero who has to confront his past and deal with a complicated relationship with his father, it has lots of savage Europeans hacking each other to death at various points, and all of this sounded very much like 'Henry V.'
The records - what little we know about Shakespeare, including the records of the plays in his playhouse - were often the story of how quickly they came off if they didn't work. They had to move on. They were absolutely led by box office.
The idea of accumulating ambitions or achievements didn't get much further than wanting to do the next exciting thing. I really haven't set out with any list of achievements.