Sir Stephen John Fry (born 24 August 1957) is an English actor, comedian, writer, and broadcaster. He began his career on the sketch comedy series Alfresco (1983–1984) and the sitcom Blackadder (1986–1989), before gaining recognition as part of the comedy duo Fry and Laurie alongside Hugh Laurie, appearing together in A Bit of Fry & Laurie (1989–1995) and Jeeves and Wooster (1990–1993). His later television roles include Kingdom (2007–2009), Bones (2007–2017), and The Dropout (2021). Fry was the original host of the comedy panel show QI (2003–2016), for which he was nominated for six BAFTA TV Awards. In 2025, Fry was knighted for services to mental health awareness, the environment, and charity.
Fry's film credits include Chariots of Fire (1981), A Fish Called Wanda (1988), Gosford Park (2001), The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (2004), V for Vendetta (2005), Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011), and Love & Friendship (2016). He portrayed the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland (2010) and its 2016 sequel, and the Master of Lake-town in the film trilogy adaptation of The Hobbit (2013–2014). For playing Oscar Wilde in the film Wilde (1997) he was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor. Between 2001 and 2017, he hosted the BAFTA Film Awards 12 times.
Fry is known for his work in theatre. He adapted Me and My Girl (1983) where it ran for eight years on the West End before transferring to Broadway where he received a Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical nomination. In 2012, Fry played Malvolio in Twelfth Night at Shakespeare's Globe. The production was then taken to the West End, before transferring to Broadway, where he received a nomination for a Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play. Fry played Lady Bracknell in the National Theatre production of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (2025–2026).
Fry has written and presented several documentary series, including the Emmy Award–winning Stephen Fry: The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive (2006) and the travel series Stephen Fry in America (2008). He is also a prolific writer, contributing to newspapers and magazines, and has written four novels and three autobiographies. He has lent his voice to numerous projects, including the audiobooks for all seven of the Harry Potter novels as well as the Paddington Bear books. Since 2011, Fry has served as president of the mental health charity Mind. In 2006, the British public ranked Fry number 9 in ITV's poll of TV's 50 Greatest Stars.
Stephen John Fry was born on 24 August 1957 in the Hampstead area of London, the son of historian Marianne Eve Fry (née Neumann) and physicist and inventor Alan John Fry (1930–2019). He has an older brother, Roger, and a younger sister, Joanna. His paternal grandmother, Ella Fry (née Pring), had roots in Cheshire and Kent. The Fry family originates around the Shillingstone and Blandford areas of Dorset; in the early 1800s, Samuel Fry settled in Surrey, with his descendants residing in Middlesex. In his autobiographical writings and elsewhere, Fry has claimed a relationship to the Fry family that founded the J. S. Fry & Sons chocolate company, John Fry (one of the signatories to the death warrant for Charles I), and the cricketer C. B. Fry. Fry's mother is Jewish, but he was not brought up in a religious family. His maternal grandparents, Martin and Rosa Neumann, were Hungarian Jews who emigrated from Šurany (now in Slovakia) to the UK in 1927, establishing themselves in Bury St. Edmunds. Rosa's parents, who originally lived in Vienna, were deported to a Nazi ghetto in Riga, where they were killed. His mother's aunt and cousins were sent to Auschwitz and Stutthof and never seen again.
Fry grew up in the village of Booton, Norfolk, having moved at an early age from Chesham, Buckinghamshire, where he had attended Chesham Preparatory School. He briefly attended Cawston Primary School in Cawston, Norfolk, before going on to Stouts Hill Preparatory School in Uley, Gloucestershire, at the age of seven, and then to Uppingham School in Rutland, where he joined Fircroft house and was described as a "near-asthmatic genius". He took his O-levels in 1972 at the early age of 14 and passed all except physics, but was expelled from Uppingham half a term into the sixth form. Fry described himself as a "monstrous" child and wrote that he was expelled for "various misdemeanours". He has also said the school permitted him to travel to London, to present a paper to the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, about parallels he had discovered between Macavity, one of T.S.Eliot's Practical Cats, and Professor Moriarty, the villain in the Sherlock Holmes stories (though he has since realised 'it was hardly news', and he had discovered no great literary secret). He then stayed in London watching films, and returned three days later than expected, by which time the police were searching for him.
He was also dismissed from Paston School, a grant-maintained grammar school that refused to let him progress to study A-Levels, and he then moved to Norfolk College of Arts and Technology, where, after two years in the sixth form studying English, French, and History of Art, he ultimately failed his A-Levels, not turning up for his English and French papers. Over the summer, Fry absconded with a credit card stolen from a family friend. He had taken a coat when leaving a pub, planning to spend the night sleeping rough, but had then discovered the card in a pocket. and used it fraudulently on a "spending spree". He was arrested in Swindon and, as a result, spent three months in Pucklechurch Remand Centre on remand. Following his release, he resumed his education at City College Norwich, promising administrators that he would study rigorously and sit the University of Cambridge entrance exams. In 1977, he passed two A-levels in English and French, with grades of A and B. He also received a grade A in an alternative O-level in the Study of Art and scored a distinction in an S-level paper in English. Having successfully passed the entrance exams in 1977, Fry was offered a scholarship at Queens' College, Cambridge, for matriculation in 1978, briefly teaching at Cundall Manor School, a preparatory school in North Yorkshire, before taking his place. At Cambridge, he joined the Footlights, appeared on the University Challenge TV quiz, and read English Literature, graduating with an upper second-class honours BA degree in 1981 (subsequently promoted automatically to a Cambridge MA degree). Fry also met his future comedy collaborator, Hugh Laurie (through their mutual friend Emma Thompson) at Cambridge and starred alongside him in the Footlights.
1981–1993: Sketch comedy beginnings
Fry wrote the play Latin! or Tobacco and Boys for the 1980 Edinburgh Festival, where it won the Fringe First prize. It had a revival in 2009 at London's Cock Tavern Theatre, directed by Adam Spreadbury-Maher. The Cellar Tapes, the Footlights Revue of 1981, won the Perrier Comedy Award. In 1984, Fry adapted the hugely successful 1930s musical Me and My Girl for the West End, where it ran for eight years and received two Laurence Olivier Awards. The show transferred to Broadway, and Fry was nominated for a Tony Award for his adaptation.
Fry has appeared in numerous advertisements, predominantly on UK television – either on-screen or in voice-over – starting with an appearance as "Count Ivan Skavinsky Skavar" in a 1982 advert for Whitbread Best Bitter. Fry has said, in his memoirs, that after receiving his payment for this work – £25,000 – he has never subsequently experienced "what one could call serious money troubles". He has since appeared in adverts for products and companies such as Marks & Spencer, Twinings, Kenco, Vauxhall Motors, Honda, Calpol, Heineken, Alliance & Leicester (a series of adverts which also featured Hugh Laurie), After Eight mints, Direct Line insurance (with Paul Merton), Trebor mints, Virgin Media, Walkers potato crisps (fronting a new flavour), and Sainsbury's supermarket. He filmed a 2016 advertisement where he explains the essence of British culture to foreigners arriving at London's Heathrow Airport.