People (Births)

• 1913 – Harry Locke, English actor (d. 1987).
• 1918 – Anne Gwynne, American actress (d. 2003).
• 1960 – Kenneth Branagh, Northern Ireland-born English actor director, producer, and screenwriter.

Harry Locke

Harry Locke (10 December 1913 to07 September 1987) was an English character actor.

He was born and died in London. He married Joan Cowderoy in 1943 and Cordelia Sewell in 1952. He was a good friend of the poet Dylan Thomas. Their friendship in London and South Leigh, Oxfordshire, has been described by Locke in a 1970s interview with the radio journalist Colin Edwards.

Locke was a familiar face in three decades of British cinema, playing small parts such as assorted cockneys, working men, clerks, porters and cab drivers, with appearances including Passport to Pimlico (1949), Reach for the Sky (1956), Carry On Nurse (1959), The Devil-Ship Pirates (1964), Alfie (1966) and The Family Way (1966).

His numerous roles on TV included Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) as a night porter in 1969. In 1972 he played Platon Karataev in the BBC production of War and Peace, with his final role, playing a gardener, in an episode of Just William, in 1977.

Other films include Private Angelo (1949) as Corporal Trivet, Sink the Bismarck! (1960) – (uncredited), and Oh! What a Lovely War (1969) – Heckler at Pankhurst Speech.

Anne Gwynne

Anne Gwynne (born Marguerite Gwynne Trice; 10 December 1918 to 31 March 2003) was an American actress who was known as one of the first scream queens because of her numerous appearances in horror films.

Gwynne was also one of the most popular pin-ups of World War II. She is the maternal grandmother of actor Chris Pine (of the Star Trek reboot films).

Kenneth Branagh

Sir Kenneth Charles Branagh (born 10 December 1960) is a British actor and filmmaker. Branagh trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and has served as its president since 2015. He has won an Academy Award, four BAFTAs (plus two honorary awards), two Emmy Awards, and a Golden Globe Award. He was appointed a Knight Bachelor in the 2012 Birthday Honours and knighted on 09 November 2012. He was made a Freeman of his native city of Belfast in January 2018. In 2020, he was listed at number 20 on The Irish Times list of Ireland’s greatest film actors.

Branagh has both directed and starred in several film adaptations of William Shakespeare’s plays, of which he is a devoted fan of, including Henry V (1989), Much Ado About Nothing (1993), Othello (1995), Hamlet (1996), Love’s Labour’s Lost (2000), and As You Like It (2006). He was nominated for Academy Awards for Best Actor and Best Director for Henry V and for Best Adapted Screenplay for Hamlet.

He has starred in the television series Fortunes of War (1987), Shackleton (2002), and Wallander (2008-2016) and in the films Celebrity (1998), Wild Wild West (1999), The Road to El Dorado (2000), as SS leader Reinhard Heydrich in Conspiracy (2001), as Professor Gilderoy Lockhart in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002), Warm Springs (2005), as Major General Henning von Tresckow in Valkyrie (2008), The Boat That Rocked (2009), as Sir Laurence Olivier in My Week with Marilyn (2011), Dunkirk (2017), and Tenet (2020). He won an International Emmy Award for Wallander and a Primetime Emmy Award for Conspiracy, and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for My Week with Marilyn.

Branagh directed and starred in the romantic thriller Dead Again (1991), the horror film Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), and the action thriller Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (2014). He directed and starred as Hercule Poirot in the mystery drama adaptations of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express (2017) and Death on the Nile (2022). He also directed such films as Swan Song (1992), which earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Live Action Short Film, The Magic Flute (2006), Sleuth (2007), the Marvel superhero film Thor (2011), the live-action adaptation of Disney’s Cinderella (2015) and Artemis Fowl (2020). For his semi-autobiographical comedy-drama Belfast (2021), Branagh was nominated for the Academy Awards for Best Picture and for Best Director, and he won the Award for Best Original Screenplay. He thereby became the first person to have been nominated in seven different categories of the Academy Awards, surpassing Walt Disney, George Clooney, and Alfonso Cuarón, each of whom have received nominations in six categories.

Branagh has narrated numerous documentary series, including Cold War (1998), Walking with Dinosaurs (1999), The Ballad of Big Al (2001), Walking with Beasts (2001), Walking with Monsters (2005), and World War 1 in Colour (2005).