As Kenneth Branagh turns sixty, he finds himself honoured by the English theatrical world as the restored heir to its tradition of the actor-manager, having created a theatre and film career unlike any other. He is an actor-manager-film director who builds on the tradition he inherits from Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, and Franco Zeffirelli even as he revises it. This overview of his career reveals that he can do small and tidy, but his cinematic imagination first feasts on Hollywood movie genres – noir thrillers, murder mysteries, Disney classics, Superhero fantasies, spy films, musicals, and bio-pics – then feeds his lasting legacy to Shakespeare on film.
