Kenneth Branagh, second of three children, was born in Belfast to working-class Protestant parents Frances (née Harper) and William Branagh, who was a plumber and carpenter, and ran a company that specialised in fitting partitions and suspended ceilings.

He was educated at Grove Primary School. At the age of nine, he relocated with his family to Reading in England to escape "the Troubles". At school, he affected an English accent to avoid bullying. On his identity today he has said, "I feel Irish. I don't think you can take Belfast out of the boy," and he attributes his "love of words" to his Irishness.

Branagh is Honorary President of NICVA (the Northern Ireland Council for Voluntary Action.) He received an honorary Doctorate in Literature from Queen's University of Belfast in 1990. He is also a patron for the charity Over The Wall.

He speaks Italian and is a lifelong supporter of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club. He was married to Emma Thompson from August 20, 1989 until 1995.

For several years after divorcing Thompson he was in a well-publicized relationship with Helena Bonham Carter, with whom he also starred and directed in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. In 2003 he married film art director Lindsay Brunnock, to whom he was introduced by Bonham Carter in 1997.

Branagh is probably best known for his film adaptations of the works of William Shakespeare, beginning with Henry V in 1989, Much Ado About Nothing, Hamlet, and Love's Labour's Lost, with As You Like It following in 2006.

As You Like It premiered in theatres in Europe, but was sent directly to television in the U.S., where it had its U.S. premiere on HBO in August of 2007. Although Branagh played the role of Iago on the 1995 Othello, he did not direct the film; it was directed by Oliver Parker. Othello is the one Shakespeare film that Branagh has appeared in which was directed by someone else.

Notable non-Shakespeare films that Branagh has appeared in include Dead Again and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, both of which he also directed, Wild Wild West, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, in which he portrayed egotistical wizard Gilderoy Lockhart, and Valkyrie, about the 1944 attempted assassination of Adolf Hitler.