Belfast child

Kenneth Branagh is knocking balls around a pool table in Belfast. It’s about as appropriate as a setting for a Kenneth Branagh interview might be. He was only nine when his family, anxious to escape the sectarian unpleasantness, left the city. But, as he admits, the place certainly left its mark.

“You can’t get too big for your boots in Belfast,” he smiles. “I’ve only lost my parents in the last two-and-a-half years, but right to the end, if anybody sounded too fond of themselves on television you could hear my father saying ‘he’s forgotten himself.’ I was never going to be allowed to do that, I can tell you.”
By now, we’re so used to thinking of Kenneth Branagh as a Great Shakespearean Actor, you forget how remarkable it is. Unlike many of his colleagues at the Royal Shakespeare Company, his background is impeccably working class. His father William was a carpenter who specialised in partitions and suspended ceilings. His mother Frances was a civil servant. His first brush with acting was borne of necessity – when the family relocated to Reading, he soon mastered an English accent to avoid taunting over his Irish brogue.
In a strange twist of fate, he first gained recognition by re-adopting the elongated vowels of his youth when in 1981 he returned to his native city to play the impoverished working class hero of the BBC’s Billy plays.
“So long ago,” sighs Branagh. “It was my first important job. We were on the bridge just around the corner there. It was fucking freezing and had the worst catering I’ve ever had. I can still taste that terrible stew. At that stage I just wanted to be a working actor. Coming from my background where acting was so alien, that would have been a result. I didn’t consider myself the sort of guy who would get on the stage. I didn’t look right.”
He couldn’t have been more wrong. From the moment he joined the RSC in his early twenties he was a sensation. At 23 he became the youngest Henry V in their history, his Hamlet took London by storm. By 28 he was enjoying life as “the new Olivier”.
“It was nice in a way,” recalls Branagh. “But it also came with baggage. If you are going to be tagged with any label then that will do okay. I had not suggested myself in that way. And as far as I could, I tried not to take it too seriously. I just presumed it was because we had both made film versions of Henry V.”
Released in 1989, Branagh’s celluloid Henry V marked the start of his career as a Shakespearean evangelist. His films of Hamlet and Much Ado About Nothing reintroduced the Bard to Hollywood. By casting actors like Denzel Washington and Keanu Reeves, Mr. Branagh proved a whole new Shakespearean demographic, thus paving the way for Baz Luhrman’s Romeo + Juliet and contemporary retoolings such as O and Ten Things I Hate About You.
“You have to feel very passionate about Shakespeare,” he says. “But you have to have a good reason to want to do them, I think. You have all these big franchise films around and then these little films – specialist films – have to fight with them. It’s getting much harder to do. The patience for having a Shakespeare film or whatever for any length of time is hard to find. You just don’t get the sleeper hits any more. I did As You Like It recently for American television and I thought we got lucky because HBO picked it up. As a result our audience was massive, much bigger than for a theatrical release.”
In 2000 Branagh became the youngest ever recipient of the Gielgud Award and was declared the “greatest Shakespearean of our day”. Even Bill Clinton sent his regards. And yet it hasn’t all been plain sailing for our Ken. For every high in his career there has been an equal low. The critics hated Frankenstein, his arty reimagining of the classic Mary Shelley novel. They hated his contemporary films even more. More gallingly, his seven-year marriage to Emma Thompson and high-profile relationship with Helena Bonham Carter made him sport for the tabloids.
“They’re much less interested in me now,” he says. “It all got very crazy when Em and I were together. Luckily, unless you are doing the most extraordinary things in your private life, then interest will eventually subside. And I like it that way. Because the media have, much to my delight, stopped reporting me a celebrity and started reporting me as an actor. Of course that doesn’t make as many headlines so I get people asking me what I’m doing now all the time. Oh, I’ve been hiding out in the Harry Potter film. Things like that.”
Though he hasn’t directed a feature since Love’s Labour’s Lost in 2000, this year Branagh the filmmaker is back with a bang. His ambitious English language adaptation of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, co-written with Stephen Fry, will hit our screens later this month. Before that, Branagh watchers will be cheered by the arrival of Sleuth, a film of Harold Pinter’s Tony Award-winning adaptation of the play by Anthony Shaffer starring Michael Caine and Jude Law.
“Michael Caine is a very funny man,” says Branagh. “You should hear his Sean Connery impersonation. People say he can’t do accents. Well, he really can’t. But him and Pinter were hilarious together. They both went to the same school so you’d sit between these old guys talking about so-and-so from Rotherhithe. But that familiarity with Pinter was important. It was quite clear they had known the same kind of people growing up and that helped them connect. Michael understood the language of Pinter very well. He can take ordinary speech and infuse it with menace. Michael could carry that and knew where the pauses were. That was fantastic because on one level Sleuth is all about a descent into the atavistic and the patina of civilisation breaking down.”
After some career missteps in Hollywood (Wild Wild West, The Road To El Dorado), Branagh does seem to be back on a roll. In recent years he has returned to the stage with storming performances in Richard III and David Mamet’s Edmond. He has racked up awards for stirring turns in Shackleton and Conspiracy for the small screen.
“It could be worse,” he tells me. “But about five or six years ago my father would still ask people to make sure and go and see stuff I was in so that I would stay in work. This place never really leaves you.”

Sleuth is in cinemas now. The Magic Flute is released on November 30.