Lenny Henry

Sir Lenworth George Henry CBE (born 29 August 1958) is a British actor, comedian, singer, television presenter and writer.

Henry first gained attention as a stand-up comedian and impressionist in the late 1970s and early 1980s, culminating in The Lenny Henry Show in 1984. He was the most prominent black British comedian of the time and much of his material served to celebrate and parody his African-Caribbean roots.

In 1985, he co-founded the charity Comic Relief with the comedy screenwriter Richard Curtis. He has appeared in numerous other TV programmes, including children's entertainment show Tiswas, sitcom Chef! and The Magicians for BBC One, and has since transitioned toward acting roles on stage and screen. He appears in the Amazon Prime series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.

Henry is the chancellor of Birmingham City University.

Quotes

• Powell's offering us £1,000 to go home. I'll take the money: the train fare's only 10 quid from here to Dudley.
  • As cited in "Profile: Lenny Henry", The Observer (26 February 1989), p. 13
  • Multiple variants of the same basic joke exist. Reputedly, Henry first performed the joke on the New Faces television talent show in 1975.

• Traditionally, television audiences have always been massively white, because it tends to be organisations such as the British Legion who apply for tickets, and black people have never felt as though they belonged in clubs like that.
  It was only when I went along to the BBC ticket unit and suggested that my stuff might appeal to people who hang out in social clubs in Brixton and Willesden that anyone thought about the imbalance. It wasn't particularly racist — it just hadn't occurred to anyone before.
  • From an interview, as cited in "Lenny's race against prejudice", The Daily Telegraph (23 January 1993), p. 19

• Robert Luff was a powerful, articulate businessman, bald-headed, very smart, about 50 to 60 years old, and he had all these shows on, all over Britain, including The Black and White Minstrel Show, which at that stage was making him a fortune.
• At first I thought it was really funny, but the warning bells went off when I saw the first publicity poster for it. It was a picture of me with one of the minstrels and I'm wiping the black off his face and he's pretending to wipe the black off my face.
• In retrospect you look back and think, "Why didn't anybody say anything?" My brother Seymour, who's incredibly militant, used to make these jokes about storming on stage in a black beret and black gloves.
  • From an interview, as cited in "Black and white like me", The Age (Melbourne, Australia, 4 July 2004)
  • Henry was "contractually obliged" to perform in Black and White Minstrel Show summer seasons from 1975 to 1980. Robert Luff died aged 94 in February 2009.