A familiar face on Masterpiece, Hugh Bonneville has been seen in programs as varied as Take a Girl Like You, in which he played a charmingly superficial ladies’ man, to Daniel Deronda, where he was a marital monster—worlds apart from his approachable patriarch Robert Crawley, Earl of Grantham, in Downton Abbey. His other Masterpiece credits includes The Cazalets, Miss Austen Regrets, Filth, and on Mystery! Poirot: Murder On The Orient Express and Miss Marple: The Mirror Crack'd From Side To Side.
In feature films, he made his debut with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, directed by Kenneth Branagh, and has since appeared in more than a dozen films, including Notting Hill, Mansfield Park, Stage Beauty, Asylum, Scenes of a Sexual Nature, Man To Man, From Time To Time, Glorious 39, Burke & Hare, Third Star, and Shanghai.
In 2002, he won the New Talent Award at the Berlin Film Festival and a BAFTA Best Supporting Actor nomination for his portrayal of the young John Bayley in Iris, and in 2008 he won Best Actor at the Monte Carlo Film Festival for his performance in French Film. In 2012 Hugh was nominated for a Golden Globe® for his performance in Downton Abbey and also received a BAFTA and British Comedy Award nomination as Best Comedy Actor for his role in Twenty Twelve, which is currently showing on BBC America.
In the mid 1990s, Bonneville co-produced Beautiful Thing at the Duke of York’s Theatre and wrote Half Time with Christopher Luscombe, which he also directed. With development funding from BBC Films, he is currently producing his first feature, based on the autobiography of journalist Byron Rogers with a screenplay by Aschlin Ditta (Scenes of a Sexual Nature, French Film).
