Tom Hiddleston

Thomas William Hiddleston was born on 9 February 1981 in the Westminster district of London. His mother, Diana Patricia Hiddleston, is an arts administrator and former stage manager from Suffolk, and his father, Dr. James Norman Hiddleston, is a physical chemist and former managing director of a biotechnology company that worked with Oxford University; he is originally from Greenock in Renfrewshire, Scotland. Hiddleston has an older sister, Sarah Alexandra Hiddleston, a journalist based in Chennai, India, and a younger sister, Emma Elizabeth Blakiston-Houston, who works as both an actress and a midwife. On his mother's side, he is a great-grandson of Vice-Admiral Reginald Servaes and a great-great-grandson of food producer Sir Edmund Vestey, making him a distant cousin of Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown. His paternal grandfather, Alexander, served in the Royal Artillery and worked as a plater in the shipyards. Hiddleston shares his name with a great-great-uncle, also Tom Hiddleston, a shipyard plater from Greenock and member of the Royal Artillery's 51st (Highland) Division, who died following the Battle of the Somme and is commemorated on the Broomhill war memorial.

Hiddleston grew up in Wimbledon before relocating to a village near Oxford. He began boarding at Windlesham House School at age seven, then transferred to the Dragon School in Oxford a year later. His parents divorced when he was twelve, and at thirteen he enrolled at Eton College. He subsequently attended Pembroke College, University of Cambridge, earning a double first honours degree in Classics. During his second term at Cambridge, talent agent Lorraine Hamilton of Hamilton Hodell noticed him in a production of A Streetcar Named Desire. He went on to graduate from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 2005 with a Bachelor of Arts honours degree in acting.

His stage career began with a debut in Journey's End in 1999. After graduating from RADA, he joined Declan Donnellan's company Cheek by Jowl, appearing in productions of Thomas Middleton's The Changeling in 2006 and Shakespeare's Cymbeline in 2007. His performance in Cymbeline earned him the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Newcomer in a Play. At the Donmar Warehouse, he played Cassio opposite Chiwetel Ejiofor and Ewan McGregor in Michael Grandage's production of Othello in 2008, receiving a Laurence Olivier Award nomination for Best Newcomer in a Play for that role, and also appeared as Lvov in a West End revival of Chekhov's Ivanov alongside Kenneth Branagh the same year. He took on the title role in a production of Coriolanus from 2013 to 2014, earning a Laurence Olivier Award nomination for Best Actor.

Hiddleston made his Broadway debut in a 2019 revival of Harold Pinter's Betrayal. The production brought him a Tony Award nomination for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Play, with the nomination formally recognized in 2020.

His screen career began while he was still a student, with television appearances in an ITV adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby in 2001, the BBC/HBO co-production Conspiracy in 2001, and the BBC/HBO drama The Gathering Storm in 2002, in which he played Randolph Churchill. His film debut came in Joanna Hogg's Unrelated in 2006, followed by a leading role in her second feature, Archipelago, in 2010. Additional early television credits include Magnus Martinsson in the BBC detective drama Wallander in 2008, John Plumptre in the BBC costume drama Miss Austen Regrets in 2008, and William Buxton in Return to Cranford in 2009.

Hiddleston gained widespread international recognition through his portrayal of Loki in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, beginning with Thor in 2011. Kenneth Branagh, who directed that film and had previously worked with Hiddleston on Ivanov and Wallander, invited him to audition. Hiddleston originally read for the role of Thor before Branagh determined he was better suited to the antagonist role of Loki. He subsequently reprised the character across multiple MCU films and in the Disney+ series Loki, which ran from 2021 to 2023. Empire magazine ranked his portrayal of Loki 19th on its list of the Greatest Movie Characters of All Time.

Also in 2011, he portrayed novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald in Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris and Captain Nicholls in Steven Spielberg's War Horse, based on Michael Morpurgo's 1982 novel. He continued working in independent film with Terence Davies's The Deep Blue Sea in 2012, Jim Jarmusch's Only Lovers Left Alive in 2013, and Guillermo del Toro's Crimson Peak in 2015. That same year he played country music singer Hank Williams in the biopic I Saw the Light, and in 2017 he led the adventure film Kong: Skull Island.

On television, Hiddleston starred in and executive produced the BBC One series The Night Manager, which began in 2016. His work on that series earned him two Primetime Emmy Award nominations and a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor. He also starred in The Life of Chuck, an adaptation of Stephen King's novella of the same name. In 2011, he received a nomination for the BAFTA Rising Star Award.