Rowan atkinson biography blackadder interview

English actor and comedian (born 1955)

Rowan Sebastian AtkinsonCBE (born 6 January 1955) is an English actor, comedian and writer. He played the title roles in the sitcoms Blackadder (1983–1989) and Mr. Bean (1990–1995), and in the film series Johnny English (2003–present). Atkinson first came to prominence on the BBCsketch comedy show Not the Nine O'Clock News (1979–1982), receiving the 1981 British Academy Television Award for Best Entertainment Performance.

Atkinson has appeared in various films, including the James Bond film Never Say Never Again (1983), The Witches (1990), Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), Rat Race, Scooby-Doo (both 2002), Love Actually (2003), and Wonka (2023). He played the voice role of Zazu in the Disney animated film The Lion King (1994). Atkinson portrayed Mr. Bean in the film adaptations Bean (1997) and Mr. Bean's Holiday (2007), and voiced the title character in Mr. Bean: The Animated Series (2002–2019). He also featured on the BBC sitcom The Thin Blue Line (1995–1996) and played fictional French police commissioner Jules Maigret in ITV's Maigret (2016–2017). His work in theatre includes the role of Fagin in the 2009 West End revival of the musical Oliver!.

Atkinson was listed in The Observer as one of the 50 funniest actors in British comedy in 2003, and among the top 50 comedians ever, in a 2005 poll of fellow comedians. Throughout his career, he has collaborated with screenwriter Richard Curtis and composer Howard Goodall, both of whom he met at the Oxford University Dramatic Society during the 1970s. In addition to his 1981 BAFTA, Atkinson received an Olivier Award for his 1981 West End theatre performance in Rowan Atkinson in Revue. Atkinson was appointed CBE in the 2013 Birthday Honours for services to drama and charity.

Early life

Atkinson was born in Consett, County Durham, England, on 6 January 1955.^&#

Johnny English is a daydream. He wouldn’t exist without another daydream, which is James Bond. In the Johnny English films, the spy is absurd; in James Bond, the audience is. It adds to his canon of ludicrous vicars and ludicrous schoolmasters: respectable people to whom terrible things – such as being known – happen.

Atkinson doesn’t like Johnny either. To Atkinson, English is, he says, “just a fairly two-dimensional, self-obsessed individual who doesn’t really show any kindness or empathy. He’s good but crucially – and this is where the comedy comes in – he’s not as good as he thinks he is.” It works as a critique of the British character and nation. “He thinks he’s better than he is and it’s that differential and discrepancy between his ambition and his capability. That’s where the joke lies.” I think he’s being too hard on Johnny English. I watch all three films that week and Johnny English loves children. He teaches a class of schoolchildren to say: “You look particularly attractive tonight” while holding martini glasses. Then he gives them jelly babies made of gelignite, so they can blow up the world.

We move to his most famous creation: the grotesque Mr Bean, who, he says, is “very strange, extremely selfish and self-centred”. He based him on “myself as a child. I feel as though it’s me as a nine-year-old – or me as an 11-year-old – because he’s essentially a child trapped in a man’s body. That’s how I’ve always seen him. He’s got the innocence but also the anarchic instinct and the unpleasantness, the uncompromisingness of children. They don’t take a particularly sophisticated view of the world and that is both Mr Bean’s strength and his problem.”

Its global appeal “was a deliberate aim. The international market.” He was in Venice in 1985, listening to Daniel Barenboim and Duran Duran (intellectual meets nerd) and pondering how musicians will “presume an internat

What comedy fan doesn’t know the name Rowan Atkinson?

Whether it’s the snide Blackadder or the simple Mr. Bean, Atkinson has earned his comic stripes.

I got a chance to speak with Atkinson when he was promoting the spy spoof Johnny English – a film about a completely inept British agent called into action after an explosion kills all of MI5’s competent agents, leaving English to save the country.

I’d long been under the impression that Atkinson did not like doing interviews, and could be a bit of a prickly pear (in fact, I was warned of such by the publicist for the film, prior to the interview). When I’ve gone into an interview with those preconceptions, they’ve usually been quickly dismissed as soon as we get to chatting – and Rowan was no exception.

However, I did feel a bit of pressure throughout, as I got the sense that he didn’t suffer fools or puff pieces. Since I hoped I wasn’t the former and definitely wasn’t interested in the latter, I think things went well. You be the judge…

KEN PLUME: What aspects of the Johnny English character appealed to you enough to make a feature film? Because originally it was a character in a series of commercials, right?

ROWAN ATKINSON: Yeah, we made it for these commercials for a credit card in Britain. We did the campaign for about 5 years, and we must have made 13 or 14 commercials. They’re only one minute commercials, but they all had a filmic quality to them, even though they were just commercials and had a slightly ridiculous character in it – who at the time was called Richard Latham, and we rechristened him Johnny English for the sake of the movie, because it’s a name people are more likely to remember. And I did like the character, and I liked the feel of the commercials – they felt like, as I say, mini-movies. So it felt like quite a logical progression to think of maybe the character – and above al

Indeed, Tony Robinson, Tim McInnerny and Hugh Laurie are just some of the names who shared that responsibility during the series' run from 1983 to 1989 on BBC One.

When asked if the titular character might resurface at some point, Atkinson said it "certainly" wasn't "impossible".

"That’s about as optimistic as I can be," he added, "and I’d rather not speculate on when it could be set. But Blackadder represented the creative energy we all had in the 80s. To try to replicate that 30 years on wouldn’t be easy."

Atkinson played different incarnations of Edmund Blackadder, each a descendant of the last, in the hit series, which is often lauded alongside Only Fools and Horses as one of the best British sitcoms of all time.

Each series is set in a different time period, with Blackadder always accompanied by dogsbody Baldrick (Robinson) and exasperated by a meddling aristocrat, played first by McInnerny (Lord Percy Percy) and then Laurie.

Read the full interview in this week's Radio Times magazine, on sale tomorrow. Looking for something else to watch? Check out our TV Guide.