About Rowan

  • Full name: Rowan Sebastian Atkinson
  • Date of birth: January 6th, 1955
  • Place of birth: Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, England
  • Occupation: actor, comedian, writer, producer
  • Notable roles: Blackadder, Mr. Bean
  • Education: Graduate of Newcastle University and Oxford University, both in England; earned degrees in electrical engineering
  • Family: wife Sunetra Sastry, children Lily and Ben
  • Hobbies: cars, particularly racing

Career overview

Rowan Atkinson is a sharp-tongued comic performer known for playing sardonic characters on English television.

Atkinson began his career writing with Richard Curtis (who went on to script much of Atkinson's subsequent work) and performing in comedy revues throughout England. This led to a stint on the celebrated comedy series, Not the Nine O'Clock News, for which he wrote and acted.

Atkinson became famous starring in Blackadder, a historical BBC "situation tragedy" co-written with Curtis. The show spawned three sequel series — Blackadder II, Blackadder the Third and Blackadder Goes Forth — which chronicled the life of the initially aristocratic Edmund Blackadder and his gradual descent down the English social ladder. Tony Robinson, Tim McInnerny, Miranda Richardson, Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry co-starred with Atkinson in the show's various incarnations. The Blackadder series went on to become one of the most successful BBC situation comedies ever.

Atkinson's film career has been less exalted, consisting of small comic supporting roles in Curtis-scripted films and a scene-stealing turn as a cleric prone to malapropisms in Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994). Back on English television, he and Curtis wrote and Atkinson starred in Mr. Bean (1990-92), a near-silent comedy series that showcased the performer's considerable physical comic abilities. Atkinson took this accident-prone character to the big screen in Bean (1997). Additionally, he returned to the series format as a by-the-book police commander in The Thin Blue Line (BBC, 1996-98).

In 1999 Atkinson reprised the role of Edmund Blackadder for the first time in a decade for Blackadder: Back and Forth, a short movie in which he co-starred with the entire original cast, and he assumed the role of the latest incarnation of the British sci-fi cult hero Dr. Who for the satirical Comic Relief: Doctor Who and the Curse of Fatal Death. He has also hilariously cameoed/starred in movies such as The Tall Guy (1989), The Lion King (voice, 1994), Maybe Baby (2000), Rat Race (2001), Love Actually (2003) and Keeping Mum (2005).

Atkinson vocally reprised Mr. Bean for an British animated series in 2002, and that same year also helped bring a classic animated series to life on the big screen as Spooky Island owner Emile Mondavarious in Scooby Doo.

In 2003 Atkinson returned to the big screen again as accident-prone secret agent Johnny English, a character he had created some years earlier for a series of Barclaycard commercials. Reteaming with his frequent producing collaborator Tim Bevan of Working Title Films, Atkinson developed the movie's story and gags over several months with screenwriters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade and director Peter Howitt. The spy comedy proved to be an international sensation, grossing over $100 million in its first 39 days of release even before it was opened in the United States.

In 2003, Atkinson was listed in The Observer as one of the 50 funniest acts in British comedy, and in a 2005 poll to find The Comedian's Comedian, he was voted amongst the top 50 comedy acts ever by fellow comedians and comedy insiders.

His most recent work is the new Mr. Bean movie, Mr. Bean's Holiday (2007), in which Bean wins a trip to Cannes where he unwittingly separates a young boy from his father and must help the two come back together. On the way he discovers France, bicycling, and true love, among other things.

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"If we lose, I'll be chopped into pieces. My arm'll end up in Essex, my torso in Norfolk and my genitalia stuck up a tree somewhere in Rutland."