Benedict Cumberbatch | Small-Screen Sherlock Benedict Cumberbatch | Early Stages London-born Benedict Cumberbatch is the son of actors Wanda Ventham and Timothy Carlton (who’s real last name is Cumberbatch). From an early age, Cumberbatch was drawn to the theatre and to the spotlight. He remembers in an interview with London Theater being “a very bossy Joseph in the Nativity play at primary school. Apparently I pushed Mary offstage because she was taking too long.” Hoping to provide him with alternatives to the stage, his parents sent him to the elite boarding school Harrows, with hopes he might pursue the law. “I got the idea of becoming a lawyer by watching Rumpole of the Bailey,” he told USA Today. But real-life lawyers proved less romantic than his fictional models. “I started meeting people they throw at you to put you off — these worn, vampiric-looking creatures who hadn’t seen daylight for a long time. I thought, ‘Wow, I’m thinking of becoming a lawyer because it’s more sensible?’” At all-male Harrow, he had to settle for playing female roles (he was Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Rosalind in As You Like It), yet it did little to dissuade him. After studying at Manchester University and the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, he found an agent and quickly established himself as a gifted stage performer.
Benedict Cumberbatch was so in demand as a stage actor that he could easily have made a career of playing Shakespeare, Ibsen and Eugene O’Neill in the West End; however, that was not to be his fate. In 2004, he was chosen to play Stephen Hawking in the BBC’s small-screen biopic of the physics genius, Hawking, and gave a brilliant performance that won him a Best Actor nomination at the BAFTA Awards. A number of other TV roles followed (including playing opposite fellow TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY star Tom Hardy in Stuart: A Life Backwards in 2007) before he found even greater success playing another brilliant British brain, Sherlock Holmes, in Sherlock, the smash hit BBC series that transposes Arthur Conan Doyle’s mysteries to the present day. “There’s a great charge you get from playing him, because of the volume of words in your head and the speed of thought – you really have to make your connections incredibly fast,” Cumberbatch told The Guardian about playing Holmes. “He is one step ahead of the audience, and of anyone around him with normal intellect.”
Benedict Cumberbatch was so in demand as a stage actor that he could easily have made a career of playing Shakespeare, Ibsen and Eugene O’Neill in the West End; however, that was not to be his fate. In 2004, he was chosen to play Stephen Hawking in the BBC’s small-screen biopic of the physics genius, Hawking, and gave a brilliant performance that won him a Best Actor nomination at the BAFTA Awards. A number of other TV roles followed (including playing opposite fellow TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY star Tom Hardy in Stuart: A Life Backwards in 2007) before he found even greater success playing another brilliant British brain, Sherlock Holmes, in Sherlock, the smash hit BBC series that transposes Arthur Conan Doyle’s mysteries to the present day. “There’s a great charge you get from playing him, because of the volume of words in your head and the speed of thought – you really have to make your connections incredibly fast,” Cumberbatch told The Guardian about playing Holmes. “He is one step ahead of the audience, and of anyone around him with normal intellect.”
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