A Year: Day to Day Men: 24th of August
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August 24, 1957 is the birthdate of comedian and actor Stephen John Fry.
Stephen Fry’s television career began with the 1982 broadcast of “The Cellar Tapes”, a revue written by Fry, Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson, and Tony Slattery. This caught the attention of the ITV Granada television studio which hired Fry, Laurie, and Thompson for the 1982 sketch comedy show, “There is Nothing to Worry About!”. A second series, retitles “Alfresco”, helped establish Fry and Laurie’s reputation as a comedy double act.
The BBC in 1986 commissioned a sketch show that became “A Bit of Fry and Laurie”, which ran for 26 episodes and spanned four successful series between 1986 and 1995. During this time period, Fry starred in “Blackadder II” as Lord Melchett, made a guest appearance in “Blackadder the Third”, and then starred in “Blackadder Goes Forth” as General Melchett again. Between 1990 and 1993, Fry starred as Jeeves, alongside Hugh Laurie’s Bertie Wooster character, in “Jeeves and Wooster”, 23 hour-long adaptions of P. G. Wodehouse’s novels.
Stephen Fry has appeared in a number of BBC adaptions of plays and books. He played the lead role and was the executive producer for the legal drama “Kingdom”, which ran for three series. Fry also took up the recurring role of doctor /chief Gordon Wyatt on the popular televison drama “Bones. The 2011 Monty Python film “Holy Flying Circus” saw Stephen Fry in the role of God.
Starting in 2006, Stephen Fry began appearing in documentaries and other fact-based programs. His first was the Emmy Award-winning 2006 “Stephen Fry: The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive”. The same year, he appeared on the BBC’s genealogy series “Who Do You Think You Are?”. In 2007, Fry presented a documentary on the subject of HIV and AIDS entitled “HIV and Me”. He followed these up with many nature series, a six-part travel series through each section of the United States, a two-part documentary on people’s attitudes to gay people in different parts of the world, and portrayed Oscar Wilde in the 1997 film “Wilde”, earning a nomination for a Golden Globe Best Actor in a Drama.
Stephen Fry married his partner, comedian Elliott Spencer on January 17, 2015, in the town of Dereham in Norfolk, England. Throughout his life, Fry has been and still is very active in social issues; he was listed number two in 2016 and number twelve in 2017 on the World Pride Power list. In August 2013, Fry published an “Open Letter to David Cameron and the IOC” calling for a boycott of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, due to concerns over the state-sanctioned persecution of LGBT people in Russia. Along with Gina Carter and Sandi Toksvig, he is a co-owner of Sprout Pictures, an independent film and television company which works across all genres.