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
Kenneth Branagh quotes about
For all the cynicism that the world contains, people are a little more open to those things that maybe are to do with returning you to some kind of simpler, happier state.
My definition of success is control.
Don’t stand up when you can sit down and don’t sit down when you can lie down.
It doesn't mean old or younger. I've learned a lot from people much younger than me as well as people much older than me. So I think it's about honesty and generosity.
Hamlet and Victor Frankenstein are each obsessed with death. Hamlet's whole story is a philosophical preparation for death; Victor's is an intellectual refusal to accept it.
One of the things that makes Hamlet unique among Shakespeare's characters is his courage to face up to the darker elements of his personality.
Friendship is one of the most tangible things in a world which offers fewer and fewer supports.
I watched a lot of musicals growing up.
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.
I don't find myself so exercised by a desperation to be new.
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 that a lot of exciting elements are finding a place where a film is happily, truly about something.
The best actors, I think, have a childlike quality. They have a sort of an ability to lose themselves. There's still some silliness.
Music and language are a vital element. We, as actors and directors, offer it to people who want to experience it. Sometimes the actual meaning is less important than the words themselves.