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Kwame Kwei-Armah OBE (born 24 March 1967〔("20 Questions With...Kwame Kwei-Armah" ). whatsonstage.com. Retrieved 29 January 2012.〕 in Hillingdon, London〔(【引用サイトリンク】 publisher =Theiapolis People )〕), born Ian Roberts, is a British actor, playwright, singer and broadcaster. In 2005 he became the second black Briton to have a play staged in the West End. (Ray Harrison Graham's Fringe First award-winning play GARY played at the Arts Theatre in 1990.) Kwei-Armah's award-winning piece ''Elmina's Kitchen'' transferred to the Garrick Theatre in 2005. He voiced Mtambo in ''The Lorax''. Brought up in Southall, he changed his name at the age of 19 after tracing his family history, through the slave trade back to his ancestral African roots in Ghana. His parents were born in Grenada. He has four children. On 1 July 2011, he became Artistic Director of Center Stage in Baltimore, MD, succeeding Irene Lewis. He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2012 Birthday Honours for services to drama.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=OBE )〕 He became the Chancellor of the University of the Arts on 7 March 2011.〔(Emily Hewett, "LCC alumnus named as new Chancellor" ), University of the Arts London.〕 ==Early life== Kwei-Armah was born in Hillingdon Hospital and named Ian Roberts.〔 He changed his name when he was aged 19 after tracing his family history (in which he first became interested as a child after watching the TV series ''Roots''), through the slave trade back to his ancestral African roots in Ghana, descendent of Coromantins. His parents were born in Grenada, then a British colony. His maternal grandmother moved to Trinidad, where she died, leaving her five children including Kwei-Armah's mother as orphans in Grenada. Kwei-Armah's mother moved to Britain in 1962. His father, Eric, moved to Britain in 1960, at a time when there was high unemployment in Grenada, and found work in London at the local Quaker Oats factory. When he was one year old, Kwei-Armah's family moved to a two-storey terraced house in Southall, London, where they rented out two rooms to help to pay for the mortgage.〔(''The House I Grew up In'' ) Radio 4.〕 Kwei-Armah started at his first primary school as a five-year-old, and after a teacher disciplined him by kicking him in the back, his mother took on three jobs to pay for him and his two siblings to go to a private stage school, the Barbara Speake Stage School in London – working as a child minder, as a night nurse at Hillingdon Hospital, and doing some hairdressing work. He also attended The Salvation Army, and received musical training there. At the age of about 35 years his mother had a stroke leading to left-sided weakness, from which she slowly recovered.〔 Kwei-Armah grew-up in Southall in the 1970s at a time when Asian families were moving in and white families were moving out, and he perceived animosity from the Asian community towards the Afro-Caribbean community. One day, at the time of the April 1979 Southall riots, his father came home after the evening work-shift and took him out to see the Hambrough Tavern on fire. Kwei-Armah saw a police van arrive, and when the police started to charge at the crowd using batons and shields he ran home frightened. From the upstairs front room he saw the police chasing black and Asian boys along the street followed by skinheads, who also had batons and shields, chasing behind the police. The event shocked him making him feel that he was living in an alien environment, and reinforced his resolve to do well in his education. He later wrote about the event in his first play, ''A Bitter Herb''.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Kwame Kwei-Armah」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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