Rowan Atkinson

Born: 6th January 1955
Where: Newcastle-upon-Tyne

The comic actor for whom the term rubber-faced could have been coined, Atkinson has succeeded in roles as varied as Mr Bean and Captain Blackadder.

He graduated from both Newcastle upon Tyne and Oxford universities in electrical engineering.

To Oxford in 1975, it was here that he met Richard Curtis, with whom he wrote and performed comedy sketches first at the Oxford Playhouse and then at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

He joined joined the BBC's Not The Nine O'Clock News, which was a huge success, and won an International Emmy Award, and the British Academy Award for Best Light Entertainment Programme of 1980

. Atkinson himself won the British Academy Award and was appointed BBC Personality of the Year.

His show at the Globe Theatre was sold-out completely and won the Society of West End Theatres award for Comedy Performance of the Year.

In 1981, he became the youngest performer to have had a one-man show in the West End.

In 1983 he started working with Richard Curtis on Blackadder, which only really took off in the second series when writer Ben Elton was brought into work on the scripts.

His first notable big screen performance was an an incompentent civil servant opposite Sir Sean Conney in Never Say Never Again.

He won the Academy Award for best short film with The Appointments of Dennis Jennings, which he starred in with Steven Wright.

Atkinson is perhaps best known for nerdy Mr Bean character, whose series have been sold to more than 200 countries.

On the big screen, Atkinson starred with Jeff Goldblum and Emma Thompson in The Tall Guy and later the spoof action comedy Hot Shots! Park Deux.

He provided the laughs as a bumbling first-time vicar in Four Weddings and a Funeral and also provided the voice for Zazu in The Lion King and was the villain in Scooby Doo.

The big screen Bean was an international success and Atkinson also starred with John Cleese and Cuba Gooding Jr in Jerry Zucker's Rat Race in 2001.

The amiable Bond spoof Johnny English followed and he starred in the Richard Curtis-directed Love Actually with Liam Neeson and Colin Firth.

Recent work includes the comedy Keeping Mum alongside Kristen Scott Thomas.