Kenneth Branagh

Shakespeare's Henry V is probably best known from the film versions starring and directed by Laurence Olivier (1944) and Kenneth Branagh (1989). The memory of these productions puts local performers at a disadvantage, and the play itself, with its heroic declamations, its scenes of pageantry and battle, offers serious challenges. The Chesapeake Shakespeare Company tackles the show boldly and comes off with credit. The outdoor production is being presented through July 6 at Patapsco Female Institute in Ellicott City, alternating with As You Like It. Does Henry V have a right to invade France?

Kenneth Branagh is one of those actors who is able to transform himself on the screen. He looms large on screen, he's almost handsome and he's certainly persuasive.Branagh is equally persuasive in person, but he is not that tall and looks almost ordinary. You might never assume he is an actor.He is, however, direct and honest in person. He wouldn't know how to dissemble, but then he is only 30 years old."Yes," he says, "I was only 29, a mere slip of a boy when I was nominated for the best actor Academy Award for 'Henry V.'"I have a huge cannon of work," he adds, explaining that he's done only four films.

Washington -- Kenneth Branagh, the man who would be king, knows that the best way to become a king is to kill one.That's exactly what the young British actor-director has been doing. Two years ago the then-28-year-old's first movie, Shakespeare's "Henry V," went head to head with the great Laurence Olivier's 1944 classic, scoring -- in the opinion of many critics -- a clear victory.Now Branagh has set out after both Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock in his second movie, "Dead Again," which opens this Friday.

It's no accident that the four cinematic treatments of Shakespeare that purists love most are Grigori Kozintsev's Russian-language "Hamlet" and "King Lear," and Akira Kurosawa's Japanese fantasias on "Lear" ("Ran") and "Macbeth" Throne of Blood").Without Shakespeare's sacred, inviolable text, we can enjoy these movies without comparisons to the originals. Even the finest English-language film treatments -- Olivier's "Henry V," "Richard III" and "Othello" -- have been subject to mean-spirited quibbling from the Shakespearean Comintern.

For an ambassador, he is surprisingly casual, in a black sport shirt and nondescript gray pants. No stiff upper lip, no stiff collar, no rigid and pretentious carriage to him. In fact, what you see is a regular bloke flopped on a couch, a bit puffy of face, under a thatch of reddish hair, attended the body over by the faintest sheathing of pudge.But Kenneth Branagh, at 32, is an ambassador: He's the sole representative of the Republic of Shakespeare, in whose love he has labored and not lost on behalf of the great dead white European male who towers over us all, like it or not. To do Shakespeare, or not to do Shakespeare: That is not the question.

Kenneth Branagh is returning to the low-budget British roots of his earlier successes for his next project, "In the Bleak Mid-Winter," which he scripted and will direct.Mr. Branagh, whose last project, "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein," was a critical and commercial disappointment, had said he planned to return to a smaller canvas for his next venture. This time, however, unlike in all his previous films, he will not act in the feature, which is privately financed and doesn't yet have a distributor.

One would imagine it is something of a bittersweet triumph for an actor to endure long enough to revisit a glory moment from his youth, albeit from the vantage point of an older character. Unlike many of his classically schooled contemporaries in England, it was never in the cards for Michael Caine to ascend from playing King Lear's Edgar, say, to Lear himself. But then how many veterans of the Royal Shakespeare Company can lay claim to having done two film versions of the super-hit stage thriller Sleuth?

HOLLYWOOD -- Jennifer Jason Leigh plays the girlfriend of Billy Baldwin, and Scott Glenn plays a veteran fireman in "Backdraft," Imagine Films' thriller about an arson investigation in Chicago, which also stars Kurt Russell. Ron Howard will direct and Richard B. Lewis will produce Greg Widen's screenplay. Filming on the Universal release began in the Windy City during the summer.Donald Sutherland will star opposite Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh in Paramount's "Dead Again," which Branagh will also direct.

"Much Ado About Nothing"Starring Kenneth Branagh, Emma Thompson and Denzel WashingtonDirected by Kenneth BranaghbTC Released by Samuel GoldwynRated PG.*** 1/25/8 Sun, sex and jokes? What could appeal more pruriently to the baser instincts of moviegoers than that recipe? And that's exactly what Kenneth Branagh serves up in great plummy gobs in his rollicking version of Shakespeare's proto-Hepburn/Tracy farce, "Much Ado About Nothing."The plot could have been hatched by a couple of hacks sitting in a Beverly Hills delicatessen over lox and bagels one morning 10 minutes before a pitch meeting with network brass.

Friends like Peter's might compel a cynic to say: Give loneliness a chance.A British-American "dramady" opening today at the Charles for three weeks, "Peter's Friends" is a blend of shticky American show-biz humor and treacly Brit melodrama. It's "Masterpiece Theater" as written by Shecky Greene.Not far from the truth, actually: It's the work of co-writers (and co-stars and co-producers and co-spouses) Rita Rudner (American comic) and her husband Martin Bergman (British producer). I'm only guessing, but I'd bet the Bergmans have seen "The Big Chill" more than once.