| Lenny Henry, CBE (born Lenny
Hinton on August 29, 1958 in Dudley, West
Midlands) is a British entertainer, whose family moved to the UK
from Jamaica in the 1950s.
Henry studied at Bluecoat Secondary Modern School, WR Tewson School, and Preston College, and has since obtained a degree in
English literature from the Open University.
His earliest TV appearances were on the New Faces TV talent show in the 1970s where he was a repeat winner. His
formative years were in working men's clubs where his unique act - a young black man impersonating white characters such as Frank
Spencer from Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em -
gave him an edge in what were racially divisive times. Subsequently he was a comedy performer on The Black and White Minstrel
Show.
Later he appeared on the children's programme Tiswas and subsequently the
show Three of a Kind with comedians Tracey Ullman and David
Copperfield. Around this time he met his future wife, Dawn French, who
encouraged him to move over to the fledgling alternative comedy
scene, where he established a career as a stand-up comedy performer
and character comedian. He introduced characters which both mocked and celebrated black British culture, such as Theophilus P.
Wildebeeste (a Barry White-a-like), Brixton pirate radio DJ Delbert Wilkins and Trevor MacDoughnut (a spoof on Trevor McDonald). Much of his stand-up material, which was enormously popular on recorded LP, owed much to the writing abilities of Kim Fuller.
Henry's TV work started pricipally with his own self-titled show, which has appeared in variant forms ever since. He was also
a part-time member of The Comic Strip.
In the early 1990s, Henry was lured to Hollywood to star in the film True Identity, in which his character spent most of the film pretending to be a white person in order to
avoid the mob. The film was not successful, and it has been suggested
that part of the problem was that the film's producers didn't really understand Henry and used him in a project that wasn't a
good match for his talents.
Henry is perhaps best known to modern audiences as the choleric chef of the comedic 1990s television series Chef!. In 1999 he also had a successful straight-acting lead role in the BBC drama Hope
And Glory and tried his hand at soul singing. He would later say that both moves were not showing him at his best and that he
felt most comfortable with character comedy, returning to the BBC to do Lenny Henry in Pieces, a character-based comedy sketch show.
In 2003, he was listed in The
Observer as one of the 50 funniest acts in
British comedy.
He married comedy actress Dawn French on October 20, 1984. They have an adopted daughter.
Henry is also one of the celebrities most associated with the British Comic Relief charity organisation along with Griff Rhys Jones.
He lent his voice to the "shrunken head" on the Knight Bus in the 2004 movie Harry
Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.
Biography
- Lenny Henry - A Biography, Jonathan Margolis (Orion, 1996)
Filmography
(incomplete)
External links
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