Daniel Radcliffe

Daniel Jacob Radcliffe was born on 23 July 1989 at Queen Charlotte's and Chelsea Hospital in the Hammersmith district of London, the only child of casting agent Marcia Jeannine Gresham and literary agent Alan George Radcliffe. His mother, born in South Africa, has Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry tracing to Germany, Lithuania, Poland, and Russia, and was raised in Westcliff-on-Sea in Essex. His father was raised in a Protestant family in Banbridge, County Down, Northern Ireland. Both of his parents had acted as children. Radcliffe was educated at three private schools for boys in London: Redcliffe School, Sussex House School, and the City of London School. He achieved A grades in three AS level exams in 2006 but did not attend university, having already decided to pursue acting and screenwriting professionally.

Radcliffe first expressed a desire to act at age five. He made his acting debut at age ten in the BBC One two-part adaptation of David Copperfield in 1999, portraying the title character as a young boy. His film debut followed in The Tailor of Panama in 2001. That same year, producer David Heyman, who had met Radcliffe at the theatre through his father, cast him as the lead in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, the film adaptation of J. K. Rowling's best-selling novel. Radcliffe went on to portray Harry Potter across all eight films in the series, from 2001 through 2011, a run that included Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and the two-part Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. His performance in Order of the Phoenix earned him several award nominations and the 2008 National Movie Award for Best Male Performance.

Alongside his film career, Radcliffe expanded into stage work. He made his Broadway debut in Equus in 2008, having first performed the production on the West End in 2007. He returned to Broadway in 2011 in the musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, a credit that earned him a Grammy Award nomination. His subsequent Broadway appearances included Martin McDonagh's The Cripple of Inishmaan in 2014 and The Lifespan of a Fact. In 2023, he appeared in Stephen Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along, a role that brought him the Tony Award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Role in a Musical in 2024 and a second Grammy Award nomination. His Broadway career spans from 2008 to 2026. Outside of Broadway, Radcliffe appeared in London revivals of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in 2017 and Samuel Beckett's Endgame in 2020.

Beyond the Harry Potter franchise, Radcliffe took on a range of film roles across multiple genres. These include the horror film The Woman in Black in 2012, the biopic Kill Your Darlings in 2013, in which he portrayed Allen Ginsberg, the surreal drama Swiss Army Man in 2016, the thriller Now You See Me 2 in 2016, and the comedy The Lost City in 2022. In 2022 he also portrayed "Weird Al" Yankovic in the musical parody Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, a performance that earned him nominations for a Primetime Emmy Award and a British Academy Television Award. From 2019 to 2023, he played multiple roles in the anthology comedy series Miracle Workers.

Radcliffe has supported several charitable organizations, among them Demelza Hospice Care for Children and the Trevor Project. The Trevor Project presented him with its Hero Award in 2011 in recognition of his advocacy on behalf of LGBTQ youth. In 2019, he explored his family history on both sides in the BBC genealogy series Who Do You Think You Are?