William Grant Oliver Attenborough was born on 26 June 1991 in West London. He is a British actor, known for his role in the BBC One series Our Girl (2020) on TV and for movies like Dunkirk (2017) and The Outpost (2020). His agency is called Hobson’s International.
He comes from a family with a strong connection to the entertainment world. His dad is a theatre director named Michael Attenborough, and his mom is actress Karen Lewis. William’s grandfather is the famous actor-director Richard Attenborough, and his grandmother is actress Sheila Sim. He is also the great-nephew of the well-known naturalist Sir David Attenborough. William is Jewish, and his great-grandparents adopted two Jewish refugee girls from the Kindertransport.
William went to St Paul’s School and later studied English Literature at Queens’ College, Cambridge, graduating in 2013.
In his career, William played the lead role in Another Country in the West End and acted alongside Nicole Kidman in Photograph 51. He has been in various TV shows and movies like The Hollow Crown, Utopia, Home Fires, Denial, and Dunkirk.
In 2018, he won The Moth London Grandslam, and in 2019, he played Ed Faulkner in The Outpost. Currently, he stars in BBC One’s Our Girl as Oliver Hurst.
Apart from acting, William is an advocate for Fossil Free UK and has worked to convince London Mayor Sadiq Khan to divest City Hall’s pension fund from fossil fuel stocks. In 2017, he launched a campaign with actress Leila Mimmack and Mark Rylance for Equity, the performers’ union, to shift its investments from fossil fuels to clean energy.
In his personal life, William identifies as queer.