With his cut-glass accent and a career steeped in Shakespeare, Kenneth Branagh appears English to his thespian core. It took a heartfelt film to remind many that he is actually from Northern Ireland.
The actor-director moved with his family to England when he was nine to escape the violence over British rule in the province -- a wrenching chapter chronicled movingly in the black-and-white drama Belfast"
The 61-year-old won the award for best original screenplay at the Oscars on Sunday -- his first Oscar in eight nominations, across a record seven different categories.
"We'll never forget all of those lost in the heartbreaking, heartwarming, human story of that amazing city of Belfast, on the fabulous island of Ireland. This means a lot. Thank you so much," Branagh said as he accepted his award.
"As somebody who was in a small house watching black-and-white television images of the Academy Awards in this working class family in the north of Belfast, to come and be here is really very meaningful," he later told journalists backstage.
The film Belfast was born during the coronavirus pandemic, as Branagh looked back to his youth growing up in a close-knit Protestant family on a mixed-faith street.
It is set in 1969, when sectarian violence exploded and Catholics were driven out of the area.
"It came out of that silence that a lot of us stared into at the beginning of the lockdown," he said when the film was released in November.
"And it certainly sent me back to this other lockdown that we experienced, where both ends of the street were barricaded.
"In this pandemic, a lot of people have made enormous numbers of sacrifices. And I think in this time, and in these communities, people did (too)," added Branagh, who was also nominated for best director and best picture as a producer.
The clutch of nominations had already made Branagh the first person to earn nods in seven different categories at the Academy Awards, underlining his versatility.
Branagh's first Oscar nominations came for his 1989 film adaptation of William Shakespeare's Henry V when he was still in his 20s and being acclaimed as the new Laurence Olivier.
Olivier, who died that year, had also been nominated for best actor for his 1944 film of the same play, an ode to English patriotism.
When Branagh was starting out, aged 19, he wrote to Olivier for advice on a part.
The veteran actor replied that he should "have a bash and hope for the best" -- words Branagh took to heart for another Oscar-nominated film, My Week With Marilyn (2011).
On the Marilyn set, that involved listening to recordings of Olivier reading the Bible, while having a prosthetic chin fitted in make-up, to perfect his character's clipped 1950s tones.
Branagh earned a further Oscar nod for Hamlet (1996), for best writing (adapted screenplay). He directed the four-hour interpretation of the Shakespeare tragedy and played the doomed Danish prince.
It was shot entirely on 70-millimetre film, an expensive format that he continues to use for its epic cinematic look including in two Agatha Christie crime capers: Murder on the Orient Express (2017) and Death on the Nile (2022).
Kenneth Charles Branagh was born on December 10, 1960 in Belfast. When the family moved to Reading, west of London, he says he shed his Northern Irish accent to avoid bullying at school.
But during UK interviews to promote the film, he slipped effortlessly into a Belfast brogue, and has said he feels Irish, not English.
He trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art -- where he has been president since 2015 -- and won acclaim for his stage performances with the Royal Shakespeare Company.
His television break came in 1982 with a series of BBC dramas about working-class life in his native Belfast.
Other small-screen roles have included Wallander His performance as the downbeat Swedish detective earned him his first BAFTA TV award for best actor in 2010.
"They took a risk in wondering whether the world would be interested in the troubled life of a melancholy Scandinavian.
"But as I have spent half my life trying to make a living doing that, it wasn't such a stretch for me," Branagh said, referring to his celebrated performances as Hamlet.
Branagh was married to Emma Thompson, his co-star in several films, from 1989 to 1995 and then had a relationship with British actress Helena Bonham Carter. He married film art director Lindsay Brunnock in 2003.
In 2012, he was made "Sir Kenneth" by Queen Elizabeth II, joining an elite cast of acting knights that included Olivier. In his citation, he was awarded both for services to drama and for the community of Northern Ireland.