Derek Jacobi
English actor (born 1938)
Sir Derek George Jacobi ( JAK-ə-bee; born 22 October 1938) is an English actor. Known for his roles on stage and screen as well as for his work at the Royal National Theatre, he has received numerous accolades including a Tony Award, a British Academy Television Award, two Laurence Olivier Awards, and two Primetime Emmy Awards. He was given a knighthood for his services to theatre by Queen Elizabeth II in 1994.
Jacobi started his professional acting career with Laurence Olivier as one of the founding members of the National Theatre. He has appeared in numerous Shakespearean stage productions including Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing, Macbeth, Twelfth Night, The Tempest, King Lear, and Romeo and Juliet. Jacobi received the Laurence Olivier Award, for the title role in Cyrano de Bergerac in 1983 and Malvolio in Twelfth Night in 2009. He also won the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play for his role as Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing in 1985.
On television, he portrayed Claudius in the BBC series I, Claudius (1976), for which he won the British Academy Television Award for Best Actor. He received two Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or Movie for The Tenth Man (1988), and Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series for Frasier (2001). He also took roles in BBC Two's The Pallisers (1974), the ITV drama series Cadfael (1994–1998), the HBO film The Gathering Storm (2002), the sitcom Vicious (2013–2016), in BBC's Last Tango in Halifax (2012–2020), and the Netflix series The Crown in 2019.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q256164. VIAF identifies the subject as 117335162. The Library of Congress control number is no89015792. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1938, 1994, 1983 and 2009.
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This entry incorporates text from “Derek Jacobi” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.