Age: 65
male
Sir Kenneth Charles Branagh (born 10 December 1960) is a Northern Irish actor and filmmaker. Born in Belfast and raised primarily in Reading, Berkshire, Branagh trained at RADA in London and served as its president from 2015 to 2024. His accolades include an Academy Award, four BAFTAs, two Emmy Awards, a Golden Globe Award, and an Olivier Award. He was appointed a Knight Bachelor in 2012 and was given Freedom of the City in his native Belfast in 2018. In 2020, he was ranked in 20th place on The Irish Times's list of Ireland's greatest film actors. Branagh has 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), and As You Like It (2006). He was nominated for Academy Awards for Best Actor and Best Director for Henry V and Best Adapted Screenplay for Hamlet. He directed Swan Song (1992), which earned a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film. He also directed Peter's Friends (1992), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994), Thor (2011), and Cinderella (2015). For his semi-autobiographical film Belfast (2021), he was nominated for the Academy Awards for Best Picture and Director and won Best Original Screenplay. Branagh directed and starred as Hercule Poirot in the Hercule Poirot film series (2017–present). He has also acted in Celebrity (1998), Wild Wild West (1999), The Road to El Dorado (2000), Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002), and Valkyrie (2008). His portrayal of Laurence Olivier in My Week with Marilyn (2011) earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He played supporting roles in Christopher Nolan's films Dunkirk (2017), Tenet (2020), and Oppenheimer (2023). Branagh has starred in the BBC1 series Fortunes of War (1987), the Channel 4 series Shackleton (2002), the television film Warm Springs (2005), and the BBC One series Wallander (2008–2016). He received a Primetime Emmy Award and an International Emmy Award for Best Actor for portraying SS leader Reinhard Heydrich in the HBO film Conspiracy (2001).
In 1890 London, private detective Sherlock Holmes and his partner Dr. John Watson prevent the ritual murder of a woman by Lord Henry Blackwood, who has killed five other young women similarly. Inspector Lestrade and the police arrest Blackwood. Three months later, Watson is engaged to Mary Morstan and moving out of 221B Baker Street; while he enjoys their adventures together, Watson looks forward to not having to deal with Holmes' eccentricities. Meanwhile, Blackwood has been sentenced to death and requests to see Holmes, whom he warns of three more unstoppable deaths that will cause great changes to the world. Blackwood is subsequently hanged. Holmes is visited by Irene Adler, a former adversary who asks him to find a missing man named Luke Reordan. After her departure, Holmes follows her as she meets with her secret employer, and only learns that the man is a professor and that he intimidates Adler. Meanwhile, sightings of a living Blackwood and the discovery of his destroyed tomb lead to belief that Blackwood has risen from the grave. Reordan is found dead inside Blackwood's coffin. Following a series of clues from the body, Holmes and Watson find Reordan's home and discover experiments attempting to merge science with magic. After they survive a battle with Blackwood's men who attempt to destroy the lab, Holmes is taken to the Temple of the Four Orders, a secret magical fraternity with considerable political influence. The leaders—Lord Chief Justice Sir Thomas Rotheram, U.S. Ambassador Standish, and Home Secretary Lord Coward—ask Holmes to stop Blackwood, a former member of the society and Sir Thomas's secret illegitimate son. That night, Sir Thomas drowns in his bath as Blackwood watches, and the next night Lord Coward calls a meeting of the Order. He nominates Blackwood to take command in place of Sir Thomas and Blackwood reveals himself to the group. Standish attempts to shoot Blackwood but is set on fire when he pulls the trigger of his gun, and runs out a window to his death. Lord Coward issues an arrest warrant for Holmes, causing him to go into hiding. Holmes studies the rituals of the Order and recognizes their symbols in Blackwood's murders that were staged at specific locations; from this he deduces the targets of the final murder are the members of Parliament. With the aid of Lestrade, Holmes fakes arrest and is taken to see Coward, where he uses evidence on Coward's clothes to deduce Blackwood has conducted a ceremony in the sewers beneath the Palace of Westminster. Holmes escapes and he, Watson, and Adler find Blackwood's men in the sewers guarding a device based on Reordan's experiments, designed to release cyanide gas into the Parliament chambers and kill all but Blackwood's supporters, whom he has secretly given an antidote. Blackwood comes before Parliament and announces their impending deaths, then attempts to activate the cyanide device by remote control, but it is disabled by Adler. Blackwood flees Parliament and sees Adler and Holmes in the sewers, and pursues them to the top of the incomplete Tower Bridge. Blackwood fights Holmes, as the latter deduces how all of Blackwood's supposed supernatural feats were the work of science and trickery. Blackwood plummets off the bridge and falls entangled in a noose of chains, killing him when the chain wrapped around his neck hangs him. Adler explains to Holmes that her employer is Professor Moriarty, and she warns that Moriarty is as intelligent as Holmes and far more duplicitous. As Watson moves out of 221B, the police report to him and Holmes that a dead officer was found near Blackwood's device. Professor Moriarty used the confrontations with Adler and Blackwood as a diversion while he took a key component, based on the infant science of radio, from the machine. Holmes looks forward to the new case and new adversary.
