Stephen Fry
Sir Stephen John Fry is a British actor, broadcaster, comedian, and writer. He began his career on the sketch comedy series Alfresco and the sitcom Blackadder, before gaining recognition as part of the comedy duo Fry and Laurie alongside Hugh Laurie, appearing together in A Bit of Fry & Laurie and Jeeves and Wooster. His later television roles include Kingdom, Bones, and It's a Sin. Fry was the original host of the comedy panel show QI, for which he was nominated for six British Academy Television Awards. In 2006, the British public ranked Fry number 9 in ITV's poll of TV's 50 Greatest Stars.
Fry's film credits include Chariots of Fire, A Fish Called Wanda ''Gosford Park, The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, V for Vendetta, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, and Love & Friendship. He portrays the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland and its 2016 sequel, and the Master of Lake-town in the film trilogy adaptation of The Hobbit. For playing Oscar Wilde in the film Wilde, Fry was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor. Between 2001 and 2017, he hosted the British Academy Film Awards 12 times.
Fry is known for his work in theatre. In 1984, he adapted Me and My Girl for the West End, where it ran for eight years and received two Laurence Olivier Awards. After it transferred to Broadway, he received a Tony Award nomination. In 2012, Fry played Malvolio in Twelfth Night at Shakespeare's Globe. The production was then taken to the West End, before transferring to Broadway, where he received a nomination for a Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play. In 2025 and early 2026, Fry played Lady Bracknell in the National Theatre production of The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde.
Fry has written and presented several documentary series, including the Emmy Award-winning Stephen Fry: The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive and the travel series Stephen Fry in America. He is also a prolific writer, contributing to newspapers and magazines, and has written four novels and three autobiographies. He has lent his voice to numerous projects, including the audiobooks for all seven of the Harry Potter novels as well as the Paddington Bear'' books. Since 2011, Fry has served as president of the mental health charity Mind. In 2025, Fry was knighted for services to mental health awareness, the environment, and charity.
Early life and education
Stephen John Fry was born on 24 August 1957 in the Hampstead area of London, the son of historian Marianne Eve Fry and physicist and inventor Alan John Fry. He has an older brother, Roger, and a younger sister, Joanna. His paternal grandmother, Ella Fry, had roots in Cheshire and Kent. The Fry family originates around the Shillingstone and Blandford areas of Dorset; in the early 1800s, Samuel Fry settled in Surrey, with his descendants residing in Middlesex. In his autobiographical writings and elsewhere, Fry has claimed a relationship to the Fry family that founded the eponymous chocolate company, John Fry, and the cricketer C. B. Fry. Fry's mother is Jewish, but he was not brought up in a religious family. His maternal grandparents, Martin and Rosa Neumann, were Hungarian Jews who emigrated from Šurany to the UK in 1927, establishing themselves in Bury St. Edmunds. Rosa's parents, who originally lived in Vienna, were deported to a Nazi ghetto in Riga, where they were killed. His mother's aunt and cousins were sent to Auschwitz and Stutthof and never seen again.Fry grew up in the village of Booton, Norfolk, having moved at an early age from Chesham, Buckinghamshire, where he had attended Chesham Preparatory School. He briefly attended Cawston Primary School in Cawston, Norfolk, before going on to Stouts Hill Preparatory School in Uley, Gloucestershire, at the age of seven, and then to Uppingham School in Rutland, where he joined Fircroft house and was described as a "near-asthmatic genius". He took his O-levels in 1972 at the early age of 14 and passed all except physics, but was expelled from Uppingham half a term into the sixth form. Fry described himself as a "monstrous" child and wrote that he was expelled for "various misdemeanours". He was later dismissed from Paston School, a grant-maintained grammar school that refused to let him progress to study A-Levels.
Fry moved to Norfolk College of Arts and Technology, where, after two years in the sixth form studying English, French, and History of Art, he ultimately failed his A-Levels, not turning up for his English and French papers. Over the summer, Fry absconded with a credit card stolen from a family friend. He had taken a coat when leaving a pub, planning to spend the night sleeping rough, but had then discovered the card in a pocket. He was arrested in Swindon and, as a result, spent three months in Pucklechurch Remand Centre on remand. Following his release, he resumed his education at City College Norwich, promising administrators that he would study rigorously and sit the University of Cambridge entrance exams. In 1977, he passed two A-levels in English and French, with grades of A and B. He also received a grade A in an alternative O-level in the Study of Art and scored a distinction in an S-level paper in English. Having successfully passed the entrance exams in 1977, Fry was offered a scholarship at Queens' College, Cambridge, for matriculation in 1978, briefly teaching at Cundall Manor School, a preparatory school in North Yorkshire, before taking his place. At Cambridge, he joined the Footlights, appeared on the University Challenge TV quiz, and read English Literature, graduating with an upper second-class honours BA degree in 1981. Fry also met his future comedy collaborator, Hugh Laurie at Cambridge and starred alongside him in the Footlights.
Career
1981–1993: Sketch comedy beginnings
Fry wrote the play Latin! or Tobacco and Boys for the 1980 Edinburgh Festival, where it won the Fringe First prize. It had a revival in 2009 at London's Cock Tavern Theatre, directed by Adam Spreadbury-Maher. The Cellar Tapes, the Footlights Revue of 1981, won the Perrier Comedy Award. In 1984, Fry adapted the hugely successful 1930s musical Me and My Girl for the West End, where it ran for eight years and received two Laurence Olivier Awards. The show transferred to Broadway, and Fry was nominated for a Tony Award for his adaptation.Fry has appeared in numerous advertisements, predominantly on UK television – either on-screen or in voice-over – starting with an appearance as "Count Ivan Skavinsky Skavar" in a 1982 advert for Whitbread Best Bitter. Fry has said, in his memoirs, that after receiving his payment for this work – £25,000 – he has never subsequently experienced "what one could call serious money troubles". He has since appeared in adverts for products and companies such as Marks & Spencer, Twinings, Kenco, Vauxhall Motors, Honda, Calpol, Heineken, Alliance & Leicester, After Eight mints, Direct Line insurance, Trebor mints, Virgin Media, Walkers potato crisps, and Sainsbury's supermarket. He filmed a 2016 advertisement where he explains the essence of British culture to foreigners arriving at London's Heathrow Airport.
Fry's career in television began with the 1982 broadcasting of The Cellar Tapes, the 1981 Cambridge Footlights Revue which was written by Fry, Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson, and Tony Slattery. The revue caught the attention of Granada Television, which, keen to replicate the success of the BBC's Not the Nine O'Clock News, hired Fry, Laurie, and Thompson to star alongside Ben Elton in There's Nothing to Worry About! A second series, retitled Alfresco, was broadcast in 1983, and a third in 1984; it established Fry and Laurie's reputation as a comedy double act. In 1983, the BBC offered Fry, Laurie, and Thompson their own show, which became The Crystal Cube, a mixture of science fiction and mockumentary that was cancelled after the first episode. Undeterred, Fry, Laurie, and Thompson appeared in "Bambi", an episode of The Young Ones from 1984 where they parodied themselves as the University Challenge representatives of "Footlights College, Oxbridge", and Fry also appeared in Ben Elton's 1985 Happy Families series. In April 1986, Fry was among the British comedians who appeared in the first live telethon Comic Relief. In 1986 and 1987, Fry and Laurie performed sketches on the LWT/Channel 4 show Saturday Live.
In 1986, the BBC commissioned a sketch show that was to become A Bit of Fry & Laurie. Following a 1987 pilot, the programme ran for 26 episodes across four series between 1989 and 1995. During this time, Fry starred in Blackadder II as Lord Melchett, made a guest appearance in Blackadder the Third as the Duke of Wellington, and then returned to a starring role in Blackadder Goes Forth as General Melchett. In a 1988 television special, Blackadder's Christmas Carol, he played the roles of Lord Melchett and Lord Frondo. Between 1990 and 1993, Fry starred as Jeeves in Jeeves and Wooster, 23 hour-long adaptations of P. G. Wodehouse's novels and short stories. Fry has appeared in several BBC adaptations of plays and books, including a 1992 adaptation of the Simon Gray play The Common Pursuit.
Having made his film début in The Good Father, followed by a brief cameo in A Fish Called Wanda, Fry was then featured by Kenneth Branagh as the eponymous Peter in Peter's Friends. Fry came to the attention of radio listeners with the 1986 creation of his alter-ego, Donald Trefusis, whose "wireless essays" were broadcast on the BBC Radio 4 programme Loose Ends. In the 1980s, he starred as David Lander in four series of the BBC Radio 4 show Delve Special, written by Tony Sarchet, which then became the six-part Channel 4 series This is David Lander in 1988. In 1988, Fry wrote and presented a six-part comedy series entitled Saturday Night Fry. Frequent radio appearances have ensued, notably on panel games Just a Minute and I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue.
Fry was cast in Simon Gray's The Common Pursuit for its first staging in the West End on 7 April 1988, with Rik Mayall, John Sessions, Sarah Berger, Paul Mooney, and John Gordon Sinclair, directed by Simon Gray. Fry is a long-standing fan of the anarchic British musical comedy group the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, and particularly of its eccentric front man, the late Vivian Stanshall. Fry helped to fund a 1988 London re-staging of Stanshall's Stinkfoot, a Comic Opera, written by Vivian and Ki Longfellow-Stanshall for the Bristol-based Old Profanity Showboat.