PATRICK MCGRADY, Director

Patrick McGrady is creative director of award-winning company Wavelength Films. After graduating with a First Class English Degree from Oxford University, he trained as a producer/director with the BBC, where he made short films for BBC2’s arts strand The Late Show and worked as a drama script editor. Before establishing Wavelength Films with Lucy Ward, he worked as a freelance director, making films for ITV, BBC and Channel 4. For Wavelength he developed and directed Stephen Fry & the Gutenberg Press, which was nominated for a BAFTA in 2009 (Huw Wheldon Award for Specialist Factual Films). He also series-produced the RTS award-winning show Disappearing London and executive-produced Suggs’ Italian Job (8 x 30’ for Sky Arts HD). Wagner & Me is Patrick’s first feature-length documentary.

STEPHEN FRY

Stephen Fry’s numerous film appearances have included award-winning performances in Peter’s Friends, Wilde, Gosford Park, V for Vendetta and Eichmann. He is currently shooting The Hobbit (dir Peter Jackson) and will be seen playing Mycroft Holmes in the new Sherlock Holmes movie. Stephen also wrote and directed Bright Young Things in 2003.

Stephen was born in 1957 and educated at an unfeasibly large number of educational establishments, most of which rapidly tired of him. At Cambridge University he met and worked with, among others, Emma Thompson and Hugh Laurie, a life-long friend and comedy partner. The Footlights Revue he wrote and performed with Thompson, Laurie and Tony Slattery won the first ever Perrier Award and was televised by the BBC. There followed three series of Blackadder with Rowan Atkinson (and Hugh Laurie again), four series of A Bit of Fry and Laurie with Hugh Laurie (both for the BBC) and also with Hugh, four series of Jeeves and Wooster for Granada TV and WGBH Boston.

He hosts the BBC quiz show QI (6 series), has completed two series of Absolute Power with John Bird for the BBC and appeared in numerous single dramas for television, including Tom Brown’s Schoolboys and most recently the series Kingdom for ITV. He has also presented the documentaries The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive, HIV and Me and Stephen Fry & the Gutenberg Press all for the BBC. Stephen’s documentary series, Stephen Fry in America, a journey through all 50 American states, aired in the UK in 2008 and was shown in the US on PBS stations in November 2009. The accompanying Harper Collins book, Stephen Fry in America, was released in the US on November 3rd 2009. His latest documentary series, Last Chance to See, was filmed in remote parts of the world and revisits endangered species that Douglas Adams first reported on 15 years ago.

As a stage actor he performed in Alan Bennett’s Forty Years On, Michael Frayn’s Look, Look, Simon Gray’s The Common Pursuit and Cell Mates. He won a Drama Circle award and a Tony Nomination for his work on the revived musical Me and My Girl which ran for years and years on Broadway and in the West End. He has also written four best-selling novels, an autobiography, Moab is My Washpot, and a book on poetry form, The Ode Less Travelled, and is well-known among a younger generation as the reader of the audiobook versions of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels.