Kenneth Branagh is staying true to his Belfast roots

Despite big success with Hollywood blockbusters and his current Shakespeare film, Kenneth Branagh is still one of the nice guys of the film world, writes Esther McCarthy

Kenneth Branagh recalls an amusing story where his concerned parents hoped he would take up a ‘secure’ job as long as a decade after he started acting. Growing up in Belfast, his dad had hoped he would take up a trade.

“My dad was a joiner, my mum worked in a chip shop,” he says. “Their goal for us was to be happy, maybe to be able to have a house, bring up a family and be healthy. My father would have loved it if I’d followed him into a trade of some sort. He was very pro-apprenticeships and less thrilled that everybody was suddenly going to university to get drunk for three years as he sometimes used to think that’s what it was.”

He adds that “not in one million years” could he or they have hoped for the success he has had.

“We would go to the theatre, we knew about actors, but no — showbiz was an absolutely alien concept and very, very worrying for them when I decided that that’s what I wanted to do.

“They had no idea, they couldn’t help me. They really didn’t know what to do. My father was asking colleagues of mine, 10, 15 years into my career, whether they thought I had a future. He really was concerned because 80% or 90% of actors were unemployed.”

Was there a point at which they realised their boy was doing all right for himself in the arts? He smiles.

“They came when we had the premiere of Hamlet in the US. For various reasons I was invited to help present Jack Lemmon with a tribute.

I brought my mum and dad to the White House. And there’s President and Mrs Clinton and the first thing they said was: ‘Oh we love your films’ in front of my mum and dad. I said: ‘Well please tell them that’! I remember mum coming away from that saying: ‘My god, son, that’s a long way from York Street’.

William and Frances, as it turns out, had every reason to be proud. Not only has their son forged a film career that has seen him act and direct both smaller films and hugely successful blockbusters such as Thor for Marvel and Cinderella for Disney, he’s also regarded as one of the nicer people in showbiz.

Now aged 58, he still retains the youthful features we’ve seen through many carnations on screen and stage.

Having moved with his family from Belfast to Reading aged nine, as the Troubles took hold, he first started to forge an interest in Shakespeare in adolescence — a love he has passionately shared throughout his career.

Branagh’s latest film, All is True, sees him actually step into the Bard’s shoes. Taking its title from an alternate name for his play Henry VIII, it tells of his return to family in Stratford following the burning of his beloved Globe Theatre to the ground. There he faces a family haunted and troubled by the death of his only son, Hamnet.

Branagh was first drawn to Shakespeare when he saw Richard Chamberlain play Hamlet on ITV one Sunday night, and found it a fascinating ghost story. A school trip to see Romeo and Juliet sealed his fate. Even then he understood in the “slightly class-conscious way of being a working-class boy” that Shakespeare was for other people.

“I remember getting caught up in it and not understanding why it moved me quite so much. But I really leant into these experiences and they got under my skin and it became a sort of a passion.

“Once I understood that you could understand it but not necessarily have to understand every word, you could experience it... all I knew was that I liked it. I knew however it was exclusive to other people somehow. So once I started to realise that perhaps I might be able to become an actor it became both a passion, because I enjoyed it, and also something of a cause too. To bang the drum for its availability, certainly to the kind of people I grew up with who just wouldn’t otherwise perhaps have been drawn to it. I always had that sort of slightly crusading element with it.”

Branagh behind the camera.

The film takes an unusual viewpoint of Shakespeare’s latter years, returning home after two decades of being celebrated in London. “Just like Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, a play about which he could not possibly have known all the truth, we look to fill in the gaps with one’s own experience of looking at the themes in Shakespeare’s plays, which are often to do with the loss of children, the end of his career, difficult relationships between fathers and daughters.”

Branagh has forged quite a career since he first landed bit parts as a young actor (you can spot him on screen for twenty seconds as a young extra on Chariots of Fire). But it was the critical and commercial success of Thor seven years ago that introduced him as director to a whole new audience.

“You don’t always have entire control over your destiny when it comes to the business of filmmaking, because it’s a costly endeavour and so I’ve been very lucky,” he says.

“It was a big career detour for me to go and do Thor, and I was lucky that it worked and enough to let me make some of these other films that have come my way. I always feel the same way about the films. I feel passionately about them because you spend a lot of time with them and they’re very intense experiences. For me it’s always been helpful to have artistic complements whether it’s in theatre or film, or whether it’s large scale film and small scale film.”

Last summer, he returned to Ireland to shoot the eagerly awaited Artemis Fowl in the north. The family blockbuster, released next August, is based on Eoin Colfer’s much-loved novels about the young criminal mastermind.

“It was great. And we got some wonderful pictures that I think will make people feel as though they’re in a big and spectacular part of Ireland and so I’m very very happy about that. It’s been very enjoyable ride. Eoin came and visited and it was lovely working with him and lovely working with Conor McPherson who did a terrific contribution to the screenplay.

“We have two very promising youngsters. Ferdia Shaw plays Artemis and Lara McDonnell plays Captain Holly Short, his fairy nemesis. I think we’ve tried to capture this unique and funny imagination that Eoin brings to it and both the magic and the Irishness that I think very compelling.

“I know for Eoin it’s been such a long time, he has been unbelievably patient but its time has come and God knows I hope that we deliver for the fans of the book and for people who are unfamiliar with it, because I think he’s a cracking character.”

All is True is in cinemas now