Matthew Tennyson
English actor of stage and screen

Matthew James Tennyson (born 1988) is an English actor of stage and screen. He won the Evening Standard Theatre Award for Outstanding Newcomer in 2012.
Early life and education
Tennyson was born in Stoke Newington, London. His father, Jonathan Tennyson, is a physics professor, and his mother, Janice Mary Hopson, is a nurse. He is a grandson of the late radio producer Hallam Tennyson, who took him to the theatre as a child. His paternal grandmother, Margot Wallach, was a Jewish refugee who had fled Nazi Germany. Tennyson is a great-great-great-grandson of poet laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
Tennyson was educated at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA), from which he graduated in 2011.
Career
Stage
Tennyson made his professional stage debut in 2011 under the direction of Trevor Nunn in the role of Percy in Flare Path at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, followed by Jamie in Beautiful Thing at The Royal Exchange for which he received the Best Newcomer award at the 2011 Manchester Theatre Awards. The following year he was the recipient of the 2012 Milton Shulman Award for Outstanding Newcomer at the Evening Standard Awards for his performance as Eric in Making Noise Quietly at the Donmar Warehouse.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16205070. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1988, 2012 and 2011.
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This entry incorporates text from “Matthew Tennyson” 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.