« Wired News Break: Something Funny in the News! | Home | January 6th, 2006 - This Day In History »
January 6th, 2006 - Happy Birthday Rowan Atkinson!
By Allie | January 6, 2007
Rowan Sebastian Atkinson (born 6 January 1955 in Consett, County Durham, England) is an English comedian, actor and writer best known for playing the title role in the British television comedy Mr. Bean and for his role as Edmund Blackadder in Blackadder.
In 1980, he won the Variety Club Award for BBC Personality of the Year.
He’s 52!
Atkinson was born to Ella May and Eric Atkinson, Anglican farmers in the town of Consett, north-west of the city of Durham. He was educated at Durham Choristers School, followed by St Bees School, and studied electrical engineering at Newcastle University. He continued with an MSc at Oxford (Queen’s College), starting his comedy career at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1977. At Oxford, he also acted and performed early sketches for the Oxford University Dramatic Society (OUDS), the Oxford Revue and the Experimental Theatre Club (ETC), meeting writer Richard Curtis and composer Howard Goodall, with whom he would continue to collaborate during his career.
Advertising
A regular to appear in television advertising, he has fronted campaigns for Hitachi electrical goods, Fujifilm, and Give Blood. Most famously, he appeared as a hapless and error-prone espionage agent in a long-running series for Barclaycard, on which character his title role in Johnny English was based.
Comedic style
Atkinson was a stutterer as a child, a condition which sometimes returns when he is in stressful situations. In particular, the letter “B” posed a problem for him. He managed to overcome this through over-articulation; however, this — somewhat ironically — evolved into one of his trademark comic devices (his pronunciation of “Bob” in Blackadder being a famous example). His other trademark is his Received Pronunciation (RP) British accent.
Atkinson’s comedy style, which is rigorously planned and scripted — partly to ensure his stress and stutter is minimised — is often visually-based. It results in comedy as performance — like Charlie Chaplin — rather than as observation or discussion, as many of the routines of the time were. Atkinson’s talent for visual comedy has seen him described as “the man with the rubber face”.
Personal Life
Atkinson married Sunetra Sastry in 1990 in a quiet ceremony in the Russian Tea Room in New York City; Stephen Fry was best man. The couple live in a manor house in Oxfordshire, and have two children, Lily and Benjamin.
Other January 6th Birthdays:
Joey Lauren Adams-Actor/Dazed and Confused 36
Syd Barrett-Pink Floyd Founder 61
Bonnie Fraklin-Actress/One Day at a Time 63
Vic Tayback-Actor/TV’s Alice 78
Topics: Celebrity Birthdays, Wired Gossip |
Related Posts
Comments