In this 1993 broadcast of The Dini Petty Show, Kenneth Branagh arrives to talk about Much Ado About Nothing — the sun-soaked Shakespeare film he made with his wife Emma Thompson, alongside Denzel Washington and Keanu Reeves. What he actually came to argue is that Shakespeare should belong to everyone, not just the people who studied it.
He makes that case from his own experience. Shakespeare intimidated him at school, and he watched it make other kids feel stupid. So he threw out what he calls the “secret Shakespeare sound,” let American actors keep their own accents, and argues that the Elizabethans probably sounded closer to a modern American — or to the Northern Irish voice he grew up with in Belfast — than to received-pronunciation stage English. He explains what he cut and why, defends the public shaming scene, and talks about Denzel Washington’s Don Pedro. His closing pitch is four words long: just go see it, no degree required.
Then Petty asks what it is like to direct his own wife. He answers with an easy tenderness. She is a great actress, he says, always on time, always knows her lines — and the only real time they get together is the drive home. Watch it knowing what the next two years would bring.
Emma Thompson and Branagh divorced in 1995. He was knighted in 2012 and won an Oscar for Belfast in 2022. Unseen since its original broadcast, this master tape has been meticulously optimized and preserved via the official archive of The Dini Petty Show.
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