Kenneth Branagh

The Weight of the British Crown

Kenneth Branagh arrived at the Oscars ceremony in 1990 at just 29 years old. He carried Henry V as his calling card, and the London press already hailed him as Laurence Olivier's natural successor. But he was more interested in running his own theater company than in inheriting other people's labels.

He was born in Belfast in 1960 into a working-class family. His move to Reading at the age of nine shaped his identity, as he had to practice an English accent to avoid being mocked at school. That ability to blend in ended up being his best tool at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

During the 1980s he founded the Renaissance Theatre Company. He didn't want to wait for the system to give him permission to direct, so he chose to seek private funding for his productions. He got Prince Charles to become the patron of his company, which gave him the decisive push to break into film.

And the gamble paid off.

The Studio Rescue

After the impact of his Shakespeare adaptations, the American market came calling. In 1991, he shot Dead Again in Los Angeles and proved he could handle film noir as smoothly as Elizabethan verse. But the industry is fickle, and the 1990s ended with the critical slump of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in 1994.

That shoot was a technical and budgetary nightmare. The press tore apart his performance, and Branagh decided to retreat once again to the stage and smaller projects. In 1996 he premiered his four-hour Hamlet. The film was shot in 70 millimeters, and although it flopped at the box office, it earned him back the respect of the academy with four nominations.

But the real money was somewhere else.

In 2011 he accepted the job of directing Thor for Marvel Studios. Many critics didn't understand what an expert in classics was doing directing a Norse god with a hammer. Branagh applied the structure of a dynastic tragedy to the script and got the film to gross 449 million dollars worldwide.

The return to black and white

The financial security that the major studios gave him allowed him to balance blockbusters with personal projects. In 2017 he began a new chapter as detective Hercule Poirot in Murder on the Orient Express. Not only did he direct the film, he also stepped in front of the camera wearing a fake mustache that fueled months of conversation on social media.

In 2021, he decided to look back and shoot Belfast. It was a spare production filmed during pandemic restrictions and centered on memories of his own childhood. He won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay in 2022, after being nominated in eight different categories over his career.

He closed his trilogy about Agatha Christie with A Haunting in Venice in 2023. The film moved away from classic mystery to brush against horror, taking advantage of the decaying architecture of the Italian city. The production budget was set at 60 million dollars, and filming wrapped in just fifty days.