Atkinson first came to prominence on the BBC sketch comedy show Not the Nine O'Clock News (1979–1982), receiving the 1981 British Academy Television Award for Best Entertainment Performance.

[4] Throughout his career, he has collaborated with screenwriter Richard Curtis and composer Howard Goodall, both of whom he met at the Oxford University Dramatic Society during the 1970s.

[5][6][7] The youngest of four boys, his parents were Eric Atkinson, a farmer and company director, and Ella May (née Bainbridge), who married on 29 June 1945.

[7] His three older brothers are Paul, who died as an infant; Rodney, a Eurosceptic economist who narrowly lost the UK Independence Party leadership election in 2000; and Rupert.

Rodney, Rowan and their older brother Rupert were brought up in Consett and went to school with the future Prime Minister, Tony Blair, at Durham Choristers.

The first series, The Black Adder (1983), co-written by Atkinson and Richard Curtis, was set in the mediæval period, with the title character unintelligent and naïve.

Atkinson also portrayed Inspector Raymond Fowler in The Thin Blue Line (1995–96), a television sitcom written by Ben Elton, which takes place in a police station located in fictitious Gasforth.

[35] Atkinson appeared at the 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony in London as Mr. Bean in a comedy sketch during a performance of "Chariots of Fire", playing a repeated single note on synthesizer.

"The stuff that has been most commercially successful for me – basically quite physical, quite childish – I increasingly feel I'm going to do a lot less of," Atkinson told The Daily Telegraph's Review.

[41] In 2015, he starred alongside Ben Miller and Rebecca Front in a sketch for BBC Red Nose Day in which Mr. Bean attends a funeral.

[45] In October 2018, Atkinson (as Mr. Bean) received YouTube's Diamond Play Button for his channel surpassing 10 million subscribers on the video platform.

Consisting of 26 episodes, the first two segments, "Game Over" and "Special Delivery", aired on 29 April 2019 on CITV in the UK as well as on Turner channels worldwide.

Atkinson gained further recognition as a verbally bumbling vicar in Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994, written and directed by his long time collaborator Richard Curtis), and featured in Disney's The Lion King (also 1994) as the voice of Zazu the red-billed hornbill.

A sequel, Mr. Bean's Holiday (2007), (again inspired to some extent by Jacques Tati in his film Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot), also became an international success.

[54] Atkinson performed live on-stage skits – also appearing with members of Monty Python – in The Secret Policeman's Ball (1979) in London for Amnesty International.

[57] The Sneeze and Other Stories, seven short Anton Chekhov plays, translated and adapted by Michael Frayn, were performed by Rowan Atkinson, Timothy West and Cheryl Campbell at the Aldwych Theatre, London in 1988 and early 1989.

[59] His portrayal and singing of Fagin at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in London gained favourable reviews and he was nominated for an Olivier Award for best actor in a musical or entertainment.

[60] On 28 November 2012, Rowan Atkinson reprised the role of Blackadder at the "We are Most Amused" comedy gala for The Prince's Trust at the Royal Albert Hall in London.

[61] In February 2013, Atkinson took on the titular role in a 12-week production (directed by Richard Eyre) of the Simon Gray play Quartermaine's Terms at Wyndham's Theatre in London with costars Conleth Hill (Game of Thrones) and Felicity Montagu (I'm Alan Partridge).

Journalist Anwar Brett writes, "Although his deadpan wit is in evidence as he speaks, Atkinson – beloved to Blackadder as much as Bean fans – takes his comedy very seriously.

[71] Of Barry Humphries' Dame Edna Everage, he states, "I loved that character – again, it's the veneer of respectability disguising suburban prejudice of a really quite vicious and dismissive nature".

He opened a window to a world that I'd never looked out on before, and I thought, "God, that's interesting," how a comic situation can be developed as purely visual and yet it's not under-cranked, it's not speeded-up, it's more deliberate; it takes its time.

In 1991, he starred in the self-penned The Driven Man, a series of sketches featuring Atkinson driving around London trying to solve his obsession with cars, and discussing it with taxi drivers, policemen, used-car salesmen and psychotherapists.

[82][83] That accident caused significant damage to the vehicle, taking over a year to be repaired and leading to the largest insurance payout in Britain, at £910,000.

[87] The Conservative Party politician Alan Clark, a devotee of classic motor cars, recorded in his published Diaries a chance meeting with a man he later realised was Atkinson while driving through Oxfordshire in May 1984: "Just after leaving the motorway at Thame I noticed a dark red DBS V8 Aston Martin on the slip road with the bonnet up, a man unhappily bending over it.

[85] A February 2024 report by the House of Lords partly blamed Atkinson for poor sales of electric cars in the UK by "damaging" the public's perception of the vehicles.

The report criticised a June 2023 opinion piece by Atkinson in The Guardian, who as an early adopter of electric vehicles, described EVs as "fast, quiet and, until recently, very cheap to run", but burdened by battery issues and misleading beliefs on their impact on the environment.

[93] In June 2005, Atkinson led a coalition of the United Kingdom's most prominent actors and writers, including Nicholas Hytner, Stephen Fry, and Ian McEwan, to the British Parliament in an attempt to force a review of the controversial Racial and Religious Hatred Bill, which they felt would give overwhelming power to religious groups to impose censorship on the arts.

[94] In 2009, he criticised homophobic speech legislation, saying that the House of Lords must vote against a government attempt to remove a free-speech clause in an anti–gay hate law.

[107][108][109] In August 2020, Atkinson added his signature to a letter coordinated by Humanist Society Scotland along with twenty other public figures including novelist Val McDermid, playwright Alan Bissett, and activist Peter Tatchell, which expressed concern about the Scottish National Party's proposed Hate Crime and Public Order Bills.