Benedict Timothy Carlton Cumberbatch
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Published
144
Film credits
3
Books
12
Awards
Benedict Cumberbatch played Sherlock Holmes on the BBC series Sherlock starting in 2010. His performance as Alan Turing in The Imitation Game 2014 earned an Academy Award nomination. He also portrays Doctor Strange in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, first appearing in 2016. He received a CBE in 2015.
Names, aliases, and relatives of Benedict Cumberbatch — birth name, kin, and personal ties.
Benedict Cumberbatch by the numbers — life, work, and family.
Benedict Cumberbatch — early life, career, personal life, and legacy.
Actor parents Wanda Ventham and Timothy Carlton raised Benedict Cumberbatch in London. He attended Brambletye School and Harrow School, where he began acting and painted oil canvases. After a gap year teaching English at a Tibetan monastery in Darjeeling, India, he studied drama at the University of Manchester, then earned an MA in Classical Acting from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.
After playing Stephen Hawking in the television movie Hawking 2004, he began portraying Sherlock Holmes on the BBC series Sherlock in 2010. He appeared in the Oscar-nominated films War Horse 2011 and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy 2011, and played the villain in Star Trek Into Darkness 2013. For his performance as Alan Turing in The Imitation Game 2014, he received Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations. He joined the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Doctor Strange in 2016 and has since reprised the role in multiple films.
Cumberbatch married theatre director Sophie Hunter on February 14, 2015, at the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul on the Isle of Wight. They have three sons: Christopher Carlton born 2015, Hal Auden born 2017, and Finn born 2019. Among his close friends are actors Martin Freeman, James McAvoy, and Tom Hardy.
Cumberbatch was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire CBE in 2015 for services to performing arts and charity. He has been named to the Time 100 list and appeared on the cover of Time magazine twice. His roles as Sherlock Holmes and Alan Turing are among his most recognizable performances, and he remains active in high-profile projects.
Browse the complete filmography of Benedict Cumberbatch — every film, TV show, and documentary credit, ranked by popularity.
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Every award, honor, and recognition received by Benedict Cumberbatch — Grammys, hall-of-fame inductions, civic honors, lifetime achievements.
Benedict Cumberbatch's bibliography — every authored, edited, and co-written book, ranked by edition count.
A wall of memorable lines from Benedict Cumberbatch — lyrics, interviews, and off-the-cuff remarks captured over a lifetime.
Cumberbatch It Sounds Like a Fart in a Bath, Doesn’t It? What a Fluffy Old Name. I Can Never Say It on a Monday Morning. When I Became an Actor, Mum Wasn’t Keen on Me Keeping It.
I Am Very Flattered. I Have Also Become a Verb as in I Have Cumberbatched the UK Audience Apparently. Who Knows, by the End of the Year I Might Become a Swear Word Too! It’s Crazy and Fun and Very Flattering.
It’s the Standard Actors’ Joke What Are You Doing After This? Oh, If Spielberg Doesn’t Call Then I’m Going to Go on Holiday. but a Week After I’d Said That, I Got the Call to Say I Had the Job. It’s One of Those Moments You Never Forget I Just Fell off My Chair. Which Is Not a Good Start to the Horseriding.
Worst Thing About My Profession? the Press, Obviously. Don’t Write That, Eh?
I Don’t Live Beyond My Means. I Enjoy Luxury and I Enjoy the Privilege of It, When I Can Afford It, and I’m in the Situation Where It’s Been Given to Me, but I’m Very Conscious of What Is Wasteful.
I’ve Always Had an Eye on Longevity; I’ve Got Loads More Goals to Achieve. It’s Not Like I’ve Completely Conquered the Whole Thing. That’s a Lifetime’s Objective, Not an Overnight Thing.
Every Time I’m Seen at a Bar with a Girl, I Get Photographed. Anyone Who Has a Computer Knows My Entire Dating History. I Get It. Paparazzi Is an Inescapable, Immovable Obstacle.
The Rule of Law Is Being Overrun so Fast, Eroding Our Civil Liberties in a Way That Fundamentalists Could Possibly Cherish. yet There Is a Very Real Threat, for the Other Liberty That We Could Have Taken Away Is Our Life, at Any Point, Through the Act of Terrorism. I Think Intelligence Services Have Really Struggled Post Iraq with Credibility, and I Feel for Them to a Certain Degree. They Are Trying to Protect Our Right to Exist.
I’ve Never Been an Activist, but I’ve Always Been Politically Aware. I Protested Against Budget Cuts and Cuts to Education. I Marched Against the Iraq War. All That Protesting Was Just Swept Aside to Pave the Way for an Illegal War, and the Results of That War Were Made Very, Very Plain by Those Leaked War Logs.
The Only Thing That May Unite All Forms of Acting in a Sense Is No Matter What Preparation You Do, No Matter What Transformative Process You Go Through, You Are Always Yourself. You Are Always Inside Your Own Skin You Are Who You Are No Matter What the Actions of the Movement or the Effect. You Have to Have an Essential Element of You, and That Is Also What Is in the Present. Once You’re in the Present and You’re Not Worried About the Wig, or the Special Effects Suit, or the Dialogue, or the Accent, or the Moral Responsibility, When You Are Lost in the Moment and You’re in the Present Is When the Stuff That’s Really Good Comes on Screen. Until That Point, You’ve Put in a Lot of Hard Work to Then Let Go, and All of Us Experience Moments and They’re Rare in Every Job I Find Where You Feel Free of Any Kind of Self Consciousness.
Hollywood Style Stardom Was Never My Goal, yet It Seems to Be Happening Due to Particular Projects. I Don’t Seek. I Don’t Avoid. I Just Follow My Path, Doing My Best.
What Matters to Me Is the Quality and the Variety of the Work. I’m in It for the Long Game. I’m Interested in Working in 40 Years’ Time, and Turning Round and Talking to an Actor on Set and Telling Them Stories About Working with Judi Dench and Michael Gambon. so Any Talk of Man of the Moment Hype, Heat, Whatever, I Just Smile Wryly. It’s the Same Shit with Sexiest Whatever I Was Around 10 Years Before That as an Actor and No One Took the Same Face Seriously. It’s All Projection.
People Say, This Is Your Moment. Well, I Hate to Say It, but I Don’t Believe in Moments. I Don’t Believe in One Offs. I Believe in Something Continuing and Continuing, and I Want to Be Doing This Job for the Next 50 Years If I Live That Long.
I’m a Homebody. I Love to Stay in at Night, Light a Fire, Have a Whiskey and Watch a Movie or Read a Good Book.
People Forget About Books. They’re Always Just Turning on the Television, but Reading a Good Book Is the Most Nourishing Thing You Can Do.
Like All of These Things, Like a Lot of Art, You Do the Work and You Let Go. You Understand How the Thing Works and Then You Let Go of It. It Should Be Something You Breathe or You Feel, Not Something That You Force or Try to Control. Looking for Happiness Is a Sure Way to Sadness, I Think. You Have to Take Each Moment as It Comes.
What Fascinates Me About a Character’s Suffering Is That My Own Life Experiences Are Far Removed from Those of My Characters And, Thankfully, the Opposite. It’s Part of an Actor’s Job to Be Interested in Psychology. However, My Knowledge About What Drives and Motivates Human Beings in Life Is Still Quite Immature. I Continue to Learn and Don’t Have All the Answers. These Roles Inspire Me to Become a Better and More Honest Human Being Whatever That Means.
Don’t Worry so Much About Pleasing People. Focus on What’s Important. Find What’s Authentic to You.
I Think It’s Deadly to Judge Your Character If You’re Portraying Someone. You Have to Inhabit It with a Certain Amount of Understanding or Empathy, or Sympathy or Whatever You Want to Call It. and to Fulfill That, It’s Not About Coming Down on Sides. It’s Not About Journalistic Headlines, or Black and White Truth Versus Fiction, or Good Against Evil It’s Much More Complex Than That.
I’ve Given up Smoking. Although I Shouldn’t Say That, Because If I Ever Have a Cigarette Again and It Will Be All Over the Place, Oh He Lied. but Touch Wood, I Haven’t Smoked for a Month Now and It’s Really Helping.
Little-known facts about Benedict Cumberbatch — origins, oddities, and behind-the-scenes details from a public life.
On the BBC series Sherlock 2010, his real parents Timothy Carlton and Wanda Ventham portrayed his character’s parents.
Cumberbatch’s warm on-screen relationship with Mrs. Hudson was influenced by his real-life friendship with actress Una Stubbs, who was a close friend of his mother.
He has central heterochromia, giving each eye a mix of blue, green, and gold, and sectoral heterochromia in his right eye, which has a brown spot. The condition was mentioned by friend James McAvoy in X-Men: First Class 2011.
To portray Sherlock Holmes, he lost weight to show Holmes’s high intelligence manifesting physically.
Journalist Caitlin Moran described his voice as a jaguar hiding in a cello. A film critic said it could have been synthesized from the timbres of Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, and Alan Rickman. He later voiced Jaguar car commercials.
During his gap year before studying drama at Manchester University, he volunteered as an English teacher at a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Darjeeling, India, where most pupils were Tibetans.
He donates his own drawings and sketches to charities and fundraisers.
In 2013, he ranked fifth on Tatler magazine’s Most Fascinating People in Britain list, above the Duchess of Cambridge and below Queen Elizabeth II.
He always wanted to act, but considered law due to his parents’ hard work. He chose acting after learning law was equally competitive.
He does notable Alan Rickman impressions.
While filming To the Ends of the Earth 2005 in South Africa, he experienced a carjacking and wrote about it for The Prince’s Trust, for which he is an ambassador.
A huge fan of Robert Downey Jr., who also played Sherlock Holmes.
His great-grandfather, Henry Arnold Cumberbatch, was Queen Victoria’s Consul General in Turkey and Lebanon, and a member of the Order of St. Michael and St. George.
Four of his five films in 2013 received Academy Award nominations: 12 Years a Slave, Star Trek Into Darkness, August: Osage County, and The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.
He enjoys extreme sports including skydiving, hot-air ballooning, scuba diving, and snowboarding.
Cumberbatch and Alan Turing, whom he played in The Imitation Game 2014, are 17th cousins, related through John Beaufort, the first Earl of Somerset.
He unexpectedly got dual voice roles on The Simpsons when visiting Fox Studios: he voiced the UK Prime Minister and did an Alan Rickman impression as Snape for a Valentine’s episode in 2013.
One of his first acting roles was playing Titania, Queen of the Fairies, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at age 13.
Dame Julie Andrews named Cumberbatch as one of the actors she is fond of.
His female fans were originally called Cumberbitches, but now use CumberCollective or Cumberpeople. He dislikes Cumberbitches for being non-inclusive.
His grandfather, Henry Carlton Cumberbatch, was a decorated submarine officer of both World Wars and a prominent figure in London high society.
He is good friends with Keira Knightley, Alice Eve, Martin Freeman, James McAvoy, Tom Hardy, Matthew Goode, Zachary Quinto, Tom Hiddleston, and Chiwetel Ejiofor.
Ranked #1 in Empire magazine’s list of 100 Sexiest Movie Stars.
He attended Harrow, an elite all-male boarding school, where he painted oil canvases and played rugby.
An early review of his performance as Nick Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream said ‘Cumberbatch’s Bottom will be long remembered’.
In 2012, he won a Laurence Olivier Award, London Evening Standard Award, and Critics’ Circle Award for alternating roles as Victor Frankenstein and the Creature in National Theatre Live: Frankenstein.
His favorite TV series include The Wire, The Office, The West Wing, Mad Men, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, and The Killing.
He met Stephen Hawking twice before playing him in Hawking 2004, and later provided Hawking’s voice for Discovery Channel documentaries.
Good friends with Jonny Lee Miller, with whom he alternated roles in Frankenstein. Miller later played Sherlock Holmes in Elementary.
His favorite filmmakers are Stanley Kubrick, Michael Winterbottom, Steven Soderbergh, John Hughes, and Alfred Hitchcock.
He earned his MA in Classical Acting from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, the UK’s oldest drama school.
He became good friends with Gary Oldman on the set of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy 2011.
As of 2022, he has appeared in six Best Picture Oscar nominees: Atonement, War Horse, 12 Years a Slave, The Imitation Game, 1917, and The Power of the Dog. 12 Years a Slave won.
His hair turned green from dye the day before filming the Sherlock pilot, but it was fixed in time.
He announced his engagement to Sophie Hunter in The Times’ Forthcoming Marriages section. He gave her a 3.5-carat yellow diamond ring valued at $450,000.
His favorite movies include Ghostbusters, Annie Hall, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Singin’ in the Rain, Wings of Desire, Bicycle Thieves, Badlands, Elephant, The Shining, Let the Right One In, Zoolander, Withnail and I, Brief Encounter, I Am Love, Michael Clayton, A Prophet, The Bourne trilogy, and Inception.
In 2013, he was featured in Entertainment Weekly’s New Hollywood feature listing the top 50 coolest, most creative entertainers.
He is good friends with Eddie Redmayne; both have played Stephen Hawking and received their first Oscar nominations in 2014 for playing real-life figures.
He has mostly English ancestry, with Welsh, Scottish, Cornish, French, Swiss-French, Swedish, German, and Dutch roots. His paternal grandfather was born in Turkey, his paternal grandmother in India, and his great-grandfather in Ukraine.
He accepted the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, noting that Stephen Hawking also suffered from the disease.
He is the son of actors Timothy Carlton and Wanda Ventham.
He received the CBE in the 2015 Queen’s Birthday Honours for services to performing arts and charity.
The Sunday Times listed him among 100 Makers of the 21st Century, calling him the next Sir Laurence Olivier.
He appeared on the cover of Time magazine in October 2013 and November 2014.
He was included on the Time 100 list of most influential people.
He has multiple Star Trek connections: he played Stephen Hawking, who appeared on Star Trek: TNG; he shares the role of Sherlock Holmes with Leonard Nimoy and Christopher Plummer; and costar Karl Urban was in Lord of the Rings while Cumberbatch was in The Hobbit.
In 2005, he was nominated for a Laurence Olivier Award for Best Supporting Actor for playing Jørgen Tesman in Hedda Gabler.
He married Sophie Hunter on February 14, 2015, at the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul on the Isle of Wight, with a reception at Mottistone Manor.
He has an older half-sister, Tracy Peacock née Tabernacle, from his mother’s first marriage.
He has starred in two World War I films: War Horse 2011 and 1917 2019.
Quick answers to the questions readers ask most about Benedict Cumberbatch.
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