Background

Stephen John Fry was born on August 24, 1957, in Hampstead, London, United Kingdom. He is a son of Alan John Fry, physicist and inventor, and Marianne Eve Fry, maiden name Newman. His mother, Marianne, was Jewish, a heritage Fry has always closely associated himself with. He grew up in Booton, in Norfolk, having moved from Buckinghamshire as a child. He has an elder brother, Roger, and Jo, a younger sister. Although he was not deprived as a child, Fry led a troubled childhood.

Education

Stephen Fry spent most of his childhood and youth at assorted boarding schools in England. At age seven he was sent far from his home in Norfolk to a boarding school where he soon earned a reputation as a troublemaker, which he retained - and, indeed, strengthened - as a teenager. As evidenced by his extensive record of violations, Fry was an inveterate liar, cheater, and thief, a perpetual liberator of change from his classmates' pockets and candy from any available source. He was also an inspired prankster, a mastermind of schemes such as resetting the stops on the organ in the school’s chapel, both to confound the organist with unexpected sounds and to disrupt the solemnity of the service. Throughout his youth, Fry had felt himself to be somewhat of an outsider.

Fry attended Cawston Primary School, Norfolk, Stouts Hill Preparatory School, Gloucestershire, and Uppingham School, Rutland. He was expelled from the Uppingham School at the age of 15, and later on from the Paston School too. While enrolled at a public school in Uppingham, Fry began a pattern of lying to teachers and stealing money from classmates, which often landed him in trouble, and once led him to attempt suicide. At 17, he was jailed for three months for stealing a credit card from a family friend. Whilst in Pucklechurch Prison, his mother would pass on cut out crosswords from newspapers which kept him occupied. After his release from the prison, Fry enrolled himself at Norwich City College.

In 1977, Stephen Fry gained a scholarship to Queens' College Cambridge. He began the studies in 1978 and earned an English degree in 1981. There, he was a member of the Cambridge Footlights and also appeared on University Challenge. After his first year, he wrote his first play, Latin! or, Tobacco and Boys, for Footlights, was a satirical tale of a pederastic prep-school teacher. The play won a Fringe First at Edinburgh Festival in 1980. The following year the play was performed at the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, a venue that became a regular showcase for Fry's early creative activity. During his third year at Cambridge, he was recruited by fellow student Hugh Laurie to join the Cambridge Footlights comedy revue, a century-old student-run organization that had spawned many of the United Kingdom's preeminent comedians. Fry and Laurie began to write together, for Footlights, in 1981, and their sketches were so successful that the group performed at various venues in the United Kingdom and took the revue on a three-month tour of Australia. They continued to perform together in various shows over a number of years.

Between 1995 and 2011, Stephen Fry has been presented honorary doctorates from the Universities of Dundee and Sussex, an honorary degree from Anglia Ruskin University, and has been made an honorary fellow of Cardiff University.

Career

Stephen Fry began his TV career with The Cellar Tapes in 1982. The show also featured Hugh Laurie, Tony Slattery, and Emma Thompson. The BBC soon offered Fry and Laurie their own show, which was named The Crystal Cube. They also appeared in The Young Ones, which starred Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson as well as an appearance in Ben Elton's Happy Families. In the second half of the 1980s, he starred in Blackadder II, and Blackadder Goes Forth, as General Melchett. In Blackadder's Christmas Carol, he played the roles of Lord Melchett and Lord Frondo. In 1986, the BBC commissioned the sketch show A Bit of Fry and Laurie. The series lasted for four series, between 1986 and 1995. From 1990 to 1993, he starred in Jeeves and Wooster, adapted from Jeeves stories, aired on the ITV network, as Jeeves, with Hugh Laurie (as Bertie Wooster).

In 2000, Stephen Fry landed the role of Professor Bellgrove in the TV adaptation of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast. The series also featured Johnathan Rhys Meyers and Christopher Lee. In 2003, he starred with John Bird on the BBC 2 television comedy serial, Absolute Power. The serial is set in the offices of Prentiss McCabe, a fictional public relations company in London. He began hosting QI (Quite Interesting), a comedy panel game television quiz show in 2003. It was conceived and co-produced by John Lloyd and features comedian, Alan Davies as a permanent panelist. In July 2006, he narrated The Story of Light Entertainment, a British documentary on BBC consisting of eight episodes, dedicated to facets such as double act, all-round entertainers, chat shows, comics, and radio stars.

Stephen Fry has also presented a number of documentaries, including 2006's The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive and 2007's HIV and Me. He has also been the subject of the BBC genealogy series Who Do You Think You Are? which traced his Slovak Jewish roots. In 2009, Fry featured in Last Chance to See, with Mark Carwardine, to honor the work that Carwardine had previously done with the author Douglas Adams. A six-part series for BBC, Stephen Fry in America, in 2008, saw him travel mostly in a cab across all the states of the United States of America, except Arkansas.

The ITV1 series Kingdom had Fry at the helm as executive producer. The show ran from 2007 to 2009 and starred Hermione Norris, Karl Davies, and Phyllida Law. In 2011, Channel 4 featured Stephen Fry's 100 Greatest Gadgets, as one of the Hundred Greatest strands. The cigarette lighter described by him as, "fire with a flick," was his choice for the greatest gadget.

Fry's Planet Word, a documentary series about language was written and presented by him. The five-hour-long episodes were broadcast on two BBC channels in September and October 2011. He lent his voice to the title role in an operetta, Paul Bunyan, composed by Benjamin Britten and staged at the Wales Millennium Centre with the Welsh National Youth Opera in August 2013. Fry also narrated the Harry Potter video games Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.

Stephen Fry appeared in a number of films in the 1980s, including The Good Father and John Cleese's A Fish Called Wanda. In 1992, he starred in Kenneth Branagh's Peter's Friends. Two years later, he portrayed Oscar Wilde in Wilde. He then went on to play a detective on Robert Altman's Gosford Park, which also starred Michael Gambon, Richard E. Grant, Maggie Smith, and Helen Mirren. In 2009, Stephen Fry appeared in Tim Burton's film version of Alice In Wonderland, alongside Helena Bonham Carter and Johnny Depp.

Fry's directorial film debut came in 2003 with Bright Young Things, an adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies. The film starred Emily Mortimer, Michael Sheen, and James McAvoy.

In 2010-2016, Stephen Fry served on the board of directors of the Norwich City Football Club.

Although he is most known for his work in television, film and on the stage, Stephen Fry considers himself a writer first and foremost. As a writer, he has produced a work of collected journalism, an autobiography, and five novels. In all, he displays his unquenchable desire to entertain, combined with erudition and use of language which reveals his masterly control over it. Fry's first novel, The Liar, published in 1991, is largely based on his experiences at the school in Uppingham. The protagonist in the story is a troubled schoolboy named Adrian Healey, who is outwardly homosexual. Fry has said that he also discovered his own homosexuality while at Uppingham. After Healey moves on to Cambridge, he comes under the tutelage of a homosexual professor, who encourages him to write a concocted lost manuscript of Charles Dickens - a pornographic work called Peter Flowerbuck.

Fry's next novel, The Hippopotamus, appeared some four years after The Liar. Fry, who took the title from a T. S. Eliot poem, uses the book to explore elements of British antisemitism. Part of the plot concerns the difficulties of a Jewish boy in an English school, which may allude to some of Fry's troubles at Uppingham. Even more so than in The Liar, he writes about homosexual sex, and even delves into bestiality. He grew more satirical with his next novel, Making History, which appeared in 1996. The book contains elements of science fiction, which was something new for Fry. The plot revolves around the efforts of a Cambridge student and a physicist, who together learn how to manipulate time and space, and attempt to erase the Holocaust by going back in time to prevent the rise of Adolf Hitler. The book is narrated by the student, Michael Young, whose post-graduate work is spent studying Hitler's early life.

Moab Is My Washpot appeared a year after Making History. As he explained to Simon Bell in an interview for the London Telegraph, Fry found it much more difficult to write an autobiography than his previous fiction. At more than 400 pages, the book only includes aspects of Fry's life from his childhood until the age of eighteen, when he was accepted to Cambridge. The title, which Fry took from Psalm 108 of the Bible, is a reference to God's disdain for all the enemies of Israel and the Jews. In the book, Fry describes his early youth as a time of privilege and relative happiness. But the period gives way to the difficulties of his juvenile years. Fry discusses his thoughts about his general cockiness during those years. In addition to describing his own life, the book offers observations about the British education system, as well as Fry's feelings about sexuality.

Stephen Fry also earned critical praise for The Stars' Tennis Balls, a novel published in 2000 and later released on audio. As in Making History, the book's plot contains its share of absurd elements. It is also Fry's most violent book, containing numerous scenes of physical brutality. The book revolves around young protagonist Ned Maddstone's odyssey of revenge against a group of jealous classmates, who, early on in the book, conspire to ruin his life.

There is an unmistakeable Wodehousian tone to Stephen Fry's work. His novels are peopled with over-privileged public schoolboys and impossibly gifted characters which he subjects to gentle mockery. It is a testament to his ability to create memorable comic set pieces and laugh out loud one-liners, that one does not become irked by a world that reeks of arrogance and self-congratulation. This is largely due to the fact that Fry's writing is hugely enjoyable. His work sparkles with Wildean wit.

Achievements

• Stephen Fry made a successful career on TV and as a writer. He received many awards and nominations, including for Golden Globe and BAFTA Awards. In 2007, he was declared "Mind Champion of the Year." He has used his public profile to promote many causes and charities. In 2009 he was awarded an honorary fellowship of the Royal College of Psychiatrists in recognition of his work in the field of mental health problems.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Fry Chronicles

    (This is the hilarious and utterly compelling story of how...)

    2010
  • Stephen Fry in America

    (Stephen Fry turns his celebrated wit and insight to unear...)

    2008
  • The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within

    (In The Ode Less Travelled, Stephen Fry invites readers to...)

    2005
  • Making History

    (Michael Young is a graduate student at Cambridge who is c...)

    1996
  • More Fool Me

    (By his early thirties, Stephen Fry - writer, comedian, st...)

    2014
  • Moab Is My Washpot: A Memoir

    (In this memoir, Stephen Fry shares the story of his youth...)

    1997
  • The Stars' Tennis Balls 2000
  • Rescuing the Spectacled Bear: A Peruvian Journey 2002

• movie

  • Wilde 1997

• series

  • A Bit of Fry & Laurie

    (Long before Hugh Laurie was "House," Hugh Laurie and Camb...)

    1987

Religion

Stephen Fry is an atheist, although he has once had his eye on pursuing a career in the priesthood. When Fry was a teenager, he loved so much about the Church - the music, the liturgy, the architecture, the clothes and he knew he could deliver fantastic sermons. He was sent to see the Bishop of Lynn who decided Stephen Fry would make a wonderful priest. But there was one problem in that he didn't believe in God. Fry prefers to describe himself as a humanist, glorifying the beauty and potential of humankind. He says: "We are captains of our soul and masters of our destiny. And we contain any divine fire that there is, the divine fire that is fine and great."

Stephen Fry often participated in public debates, speeches, and forums with the late, great atheist Christopher Hitchens. Like Hitchens, Fry is no stranger to heavy criticism of modern religious institutions. His condemnations have included Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. He once said of the Catholic Church: "I genuinely believe that the Catholic Church is not, to put it at its mildest, a force for good in the world…Do you know who would be the last person to ever be accepted as a prince of the church? The Galilean carpenter, that Jew [read: Jesus]. They would kick him out before he tried to cross the threshold. He would be so ill at ease in the church."

Strangely, Fry is sympathetic towards the polytheistic religions, particularly the religion of the ancient Greeks. Fry says they paint a much more realistic picture of the natural world and human nature, being that their gods are "capricious, unkind, malicious mostly, temperamental, envious, and most deeply unpleasant."

To the question "Suppose it's all true and you walk up to the pearly gates and you are confronted by God. What will Stephen Fry say to Him, Her or It?" Stephen Fry answered: "Bone cancer in children? What's that about? How dare you." He continued: "How dare you create a world in which there is such misery that is not our fault. It's not right. It's utterly, utterly evil. Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid God who creates a world that is so full of injustice and pain?" When asked whether he believed such a response would get him into heaven, Fry replied that he wasn't interested in going to heaven according to the terms of the sort of God he had just described.

Politics

Stephen Fry is a liberal and a Labour Party supporter. He did an ad campaign with Hugh Laurie on behalf of the British Labour Party that portrayed Tory fat-cats as self-serving tax dodgers. That ad claimed that the Labour Party would close tax loopholes that allowed the United Kingdom's wealthiest citizens to get away with billions of pounds of discounts while hammering small business owners and regular citizens. Later, however, Fry was critical of the Labour Party under Tony Blair for its involvement in the Iraq War and its "Third Way," a doctrine of compromise between disparate liberal and conservative factions. As a result, Fry declined to vote in the 2005 British general elections. He was essentially unhappy that Labour was trying to become centrist for the sake of a more functional government.

Views

Initially, Stephen Fry tried to keep his homosexuality a secret, but later he became an outspoken supporter of gay rights. An early comment about his sexuality embodies his wry humor: "I suppose it all began when I came out of the womb. I looked back up at my mother and thought to myself: that's the last time I'm going up one of those."

Quotations: "If you know someone who's depressed, please resolve never to ask them why. Depression isn't a straightforward response to a bad situation; depression just is, like the weather. Try to understand the blackness, lethargy, hopelessness, and loneliness they're going through. Be there for them when they come through the other side. It's hard to be a friend to someone who's depressed, but it is one of the kindest, noblest, and best things you will ever do."

"Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators."

"You are who you are when nobody's watching."

"Stop feeling sorry for yourself and you will be happy."

"Language is my whore, my mistress, my wife, my pen-friend, my check-out girl. Language is a complimentary moist lemon-scented cleansing square or handy freshen-up wipette. Language is the breath of God, the dew on a fresh apple, it's the soft rain of dust that falls into a shaft of morning sun when you pull from an old bookshelf a forgotten volume of erotic diaries; language is the faint scent of urine on a pair of boxer shorts, it's a half-remembered childhood birthday party, a creak on the stair, a spluttering match held to a frosted pane, the warm wet, trusting touch of a leaking nappy, the hulk of a charred Panzer, the underside of a granite boulder, the first downy growth on the upper lip of a Mediterranean girl, cobwebs long since overrun by an old Wellington boot."

"I am a lover of truth, a worshiper of freedom, a celebrant at the altar of language and purity and tolerance."

"We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing - an actor, a writer - I am a person who does things - I write, I act - and I never know what I'm going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun."

"Having a great intellect is no path to being happy."

"It is a cliche that most cliches are true, but then like most cliches, that cliche is untrue."

"Education is the sum of what students teach each other between lectures and seminars."

Membership

• 

  Amnesty International , United Kingdom

• 

  Comic Relief , United Kingdom

• 

  Groucho Club , United Kingdom

• 

  British Jews for Justice for Palestinians , United Kingdom

Personality

Stephen Fry is regarded in the United Kingdom as "Britain's Favorite Teddy Bear." He is a keen teddy bear collector himself and has presented a television documentary on bears. Technology is one of his passions and he was an early adopter of Twitter, where he is followed by more than 12 million users.

Physical Characteristics: Height: 6' 5" or 196 cm.

Weight: 220 lbs or 100 kg.

Biceps size: 16.

Body measurements (chest-waist-hips): 44-34-38.

Shoe size (UK): 11.

Eye color: blue.

Hair color: greyish-white.

Recently, Stephen Fry opened up about his weight loss journey where he lost more than 33 kilograms (72 pounds). Earlier in 2017, Stephen was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Later, in April 2019, he began to change his lifestyle. During an interview with BBC Breakfast, he told that he used to walk a lot and avoid unhealthy food. Fry also told his viewers that he was 21 stone which is around 294 pounds (133 kilograms). Currently, the comedian weighs around 100 kilograms (220 pounds).

Many years after receiving a bipolar disorder diagnosis at age 37, now Stephen Fry is aware of his triggers, surrounds himself with assistants and agents who support his mental health, and keeps a sense of humor about it all. Stephen Fry has become a major proponent for mental health awareness, exploring bipolar disorder in the 2006 two-part documentary Stephen Fry: The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive and was named president of mental health charity Mind in 2011. Fry thinks that young people need to be mindful of stress and pressure. Part of the mental health charity’s work involves connecting people with its network of about 135 local chapters ("Local Minds") across England and Wales. This sense of community is critical when it becomes too easy to detach from the world, Fry says.

Interests

• pressing wild flowers, reading

• Writers

  William Shakespeare

• Sport & Clubs

  cricket, football, Norwich City Football Club

• Music & Bands

  Elvis Presley

Connections

Stephen Fry has been married to Elliott Spencer since 2015.

Father:

Alan John Fry

Mother:

Marianne Eve Fry

husband:

Elliott Spencer

Elliott Spencer was born in 1987, in Southhampton, United Kingdom, and has always had big dreams to become a comic. He has plenty of friends and moves around comedy circles with the likes of Jimmy Carr and David Mitchell.

He met Stephen Fry in 2014 and their romance began that summer. Elliot was known as Mr. E before he and Stephen unveiled their relationship to the world. They were married in 2015 - the loved-up couple share a 30 year age gap and Elliott's father is the same age as his husband Stephen. Since marrying Stephen, Elliott has been going from strength to strength - they both have. Elliott has been helping Stephen through the ups and downs that come from bipolar disorder and together they bring each other happiness and light. They both share a love of the arts and so Elliott has been attending different shows and exhibitions along with Stephen. Perhaps most pertinent for Elliott, however, is their globetrotting, which has enabled him to build his photography portfolio.

Brother:

Roger Fry

Sister:

Joanna Roselle Crocker

Joanna Roselle Fry was born in 1964, in Buckinghamshire, United Kingdom. She has been married to Philip James Crocker since September 2001. She was previously married to Richard William J. Foster.

Grandfather:

Martin Neumann

Martin Neumann was a larger-than-life Jewish émigré from Eastern Europe who had the apparently infuriating habit of punning in two languages. It was Martin's expertise in the sugar industry that brought him to the United Kingdom in 1927, accompanied by his wife and daughter. Having worked at Europe's largest sugar beet factory, in Surany, Slovakia, Neumann was recruited as an advisor at a newly established factory in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk.

Aged just 18, Martin volunteered the Austro-Hungarian army and won a medal for his service on the Eastern Front in Romania. When the conflict ended, Martin visited distant cousins, the Brauns, in Vienna. He was generously received, in part perhaps because he brought food at a time of shortages. Martin subsequently married Rosa Braun, Stephen Fry's grandmother. Seeing the apartment block where the Brauns lived, Fry discovers a plaque that features the names of his great-grandparents, Samuel and Berta. It’s a monument to those who lived in the building and were taken to the concentration camps during the Holocaust. Samuel and Berta were among 65,000 Viennese Jews deported to a ghetto in Latvia in 1942.

Surany was once part of Hungary, a country that fought with the Axis powers in the Second World War. More than 600 Jews from Surany were murdered in the Holocaust. They included Martin's sister, Reska, her husband, Tobias Lamm, and the couple's young children.

grandmother:

Ella Florence Pring

grandmother:

Rosa Braun

friend, colleague:

Hugh Laurie

Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie met while they were undergraduates at Cambridge University and members of Footlights. They were introduced to each other by fellow student Emma Thompson. Their shared sense of humor immediately clicked, forging a comic partnership that became one of the strongest and most enduring in Britain across the 80s and 90s. After joining ensemble sketch show Alfresco, alongside Thompson and Robbie Coltrane and following appearances on Saturday Live, in 1987 they landed their own BBC series.

This outlet for their burgeoning writing and performing talents enabled them to explore their particular brand of humor, which readily mixed subtle wordplay with slapstick and maintained an anarchic edge partly thanks to their awareness of, and frequent references to, the set of their own show. The mix of sketches had a healthy hit-rate and unpredictability, alternating between items recorded in front of the audience and items shot on location. And as in all great double acts, both performers had something individual to offer, be it Fry's love of language and delight in innuendo or Laurie's ability to parody musical genres at the piano. A Bit of Fry and Laurie ran to four series ending in 1995, although the pair have reunited regularly, particularly for the BBC's biennial Comic Relief event.

Friend:

Charles, Prince of Wales

Stephen Fry has worked for the Prince's Trust. In 2005, he attended the Prince Charles' wedding to Camilla Parker Bowles.

Friend:

Rowan Atkinson

In 1990, Stephen Fry was a best man at Rowan Atkinson's wedding to Sunetra Sastry.

colleague, friend:

Emma Thompson

Stephen Fry worked with Emma Thompson at Cambridge University.

References

• Stephen Fry