Stephen Fry

Diagnoses

Passions

Vocation

Family

English comedian, actor, writer, presenter, director, and activist. After a troubled childhood and adolescence, during which he was expelled from two schools and spent three months in prison for credit card fraud, he secured a place at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he studied English literature. While at university, Fry became involved with the Cambridge Footlights, where he met his long-time collaborator Hugh Laurie. As half of the comic double act Fry and Laurie, he co-wrote and co-starred in A Bit of Fry & Laurie, and took the role of Jeeves (with Laurie playing Wooster) in Jeeves and Wooster. Fry's acting roles include a Golden Globe Award–nominated lead performance in the film Wilde, Melchett in the BBC television series Blackadder, the title character in the television series Kingdom, a recurring guest role as Dr. Gordon Wyatt on the crime series Bones, and as Gordon Deitrich in the dystopian thriller V for Vendetta. He has also written and presented several documentary series, including the Emmy Award–winning Stephen Fry: The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive, which saw him explore his mental illness. He is also the long-time host of the BBC television quiz show QI. Besides working in television, Fry has contributed columns and articles for newspapers and magazines and written four novels and two volumes of autobiography, Moab Is My Washpot and The Fry Chronicles. He also appears frequently on BBC Radio 4, starring in the comedy series Absolute Power, being a frequent guest on panel games. Fry is also known for his voice-overs, reading all seven of the Harry Potter novels for the UK audiobook recordings, and narrating the LittleBigPlanet series of video games as well as an animated series of explanations of the laws of cricket. While now openly gay, Fry struggled to keep his homosexuality secret during his teenage years at public school, and by his own account did not engage in sexual activity for 16 years from 1979 until 1995. He has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and has attempted suicide on a number of occasions, most recently in 2012. Fry wields a considerable amount of influence through his use of Twitter, having 12.4 million followers as of February 2017. In February 2018, aged 60, Fry announced via a video that he had an operation to treat prostate cancer, involving the removal of that organ and 11 adjacent lymph nodes, and he was recovering from the surgery. He described the cancer as aggressive and said that early intervention had saved his life. Link to Wikipedia biography