Ben Chaplin was born Benedict Greenwood and borrowed his mother's maiden name for the stage
Before Hollywood cast him opposite Uma Thurman and Nicole Kidman, Ben Chaplin was juggling office work and a stint crunching numbers as a statistician for London's transport authority. Born Benedict John Greenwood in Windsor in 1969, he built a career that has swung between Terrence Malick epics, tabloid drama on the BBC and nominations on London and Broadway stages.
His parents were Cynthia, a teacher whose maiden name he later adopted, and Peter Greenwood, a civil engineer appointed CBE. A school play at the Princess Margaret Royal Free School hooked him as a teenager, and at seventeen he went to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. Early work meant small BBC parts squeezed between ordinary jobs.
The breakthrough came in 1992, when he starred with Jason Flemyng in Bye Bye Baby for Channel Four, and he played a servant for James Ivory and Ismail Merchant in The Remains of the Day. On stage, his Tom Wingfield in Sam Mendes' production of The Glass Menagerie earned an Olivier nomination in 1995. That same year he led the first series of the BBC Two sitcom Game On as Matthew, then walked away; Neil Stuke took over the part.
America followed. Michael Lehmann put him between Uma Thurman and Janeane Garofalo in The Truth About Cats & Dogs (1996), a modern spin on Cyrano de Bergerac, and he played a fortune hunter in Washington Square (1997), which critics liked but audiences skipped. Terrence Malick used him twice, as Private Bell in The Thin Red Line (1998) and in a small part in The New World (2005). In Birthday Girl (2001) he was a shy bank clerk who orders a Russian bride played by Nicole Kidman; in Murder by Numbers (2002) he partnered Sandra Bullock on a hunt for a killer.
Theatre has kept pulling him back. He picked up a Tony nomination for The Retreat from Moscow and appeared in the first production of Consent at the National Theatre in 2017. Later screen work includes Cinderella's father in Cinderella (2015), Apple Tree Yard alongside Emily Watson, and the BBC series Press, where his unscrupulous tabloid editor Duncan Allen drew warm reviews.
Source: Ben Chaplin
