Sir Lenny Henry CBE
About
Lenny Henry is smart, suave, top comedy talent. Sir Lenny is a co-founder of Comic Relief.
Lenny Henry‘s formative years were spent impersonating white characters such as Frank Spencer from Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em. This gave him an edge in what were racially divisive times. Subsequently he was a comedy performer on The Black and White Minstrel Show.
Stand-Up
Later he appeared on the children’s programme Tiswas and subsequently the show Three of a Kind. Around this time he met his future wife, Dawn French, who encouraged him to move over to the fledgling alternative comedy scene. Here he established a career as a stand-up comedy performer and character comedian. He introduced characters which both mocked and celebrated black British culture.
In the early 1990s, Henry was lured to Hollywood to star in the film True Identity. His character spent most of the film pretending to be a white person in order to avoid the mob.
Chef!
Lenny 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, appearing, for example, as a back-up singer on Kate Bush’s last recorded album in 1993.
Comic Relief
Henry is also one of the celebrities most associated with the British Comic Relief charity organisation along with Griff Rhys Jones and founder Richard Curtis.
Voice Overs
He was also the voice of the “shrunken head” on the Knight Bus in the 2004 movie Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and read the audio book version of Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys. He also voices a character on the children’s show Little Robots.
In early 2008, his show lennyhenry.tv was broadcast on BBC One. The programme has an accompanying website of the same name and broadcasts strange, weird and generally amusing on-line videos and CCTV clips. Lenny Henry also starred in the Radio 4 show Rudy’s Rare Records.