Richard Curtis is a screen writer and director, responsible for films such as Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Bridget Jones’s Diary, Mr. Bean, Love Actually, The Boat That Rocked, About Time and most recently Trash and Esio Trot.

In the other half of Richard’s life, he is the Co-Founder and Vice-Chair of Comic Relief, which he started after visiting Ethiopia during the 1985 famine. In 1988, Comic Relief launched its Red Nose Day fundraising initiative, including a live TV broadcast for the BBC, which brought together some of the biggest celebrities of the day. Since then, Richard has produced more than 16 live nights of television and Red Nose Day has raised more than £1 billion for projects in the UK and around the world.

In 2015, Richard launched Red Nose Day in the United States, dedicated to ending child poverty. It included a live telecast on NBC and raised over $23 million. Red Nose Day returned to the US in 2016 and again this year – bringing the total raised so far to almost $100 million.

Richard was a founding member of Make Poverty History and worked both on that campaign and on Live 8 in 2005. As part of his contribution to the campaign Richard wrote The Girl in the Café for HBO and the BBC – a television drama based around the G8 Summit, which won three Emmys. In 2012, Phillip Noyce directed Richard’s TV movie Mary and Martha, a film about two mothers losing their sons to malaria. It has been shown in 50 countries around the world and used as a campaigning tool by many organizations committed to ending malaria.

In 2014 Richard founded Project Everyone. Working alongside the United Nations, Project Everyone helped to launch and promote the Global Goals for Sustainable Development, a series of ambitious targets to end extreme poverty, fight inequality and injustice and combat climate change by 2030. In 2015 as part of this endeavour Richard co-produced the Global Citizen Festival, live from Central Park, which was broadcast in 150 territories worldwide.

In January 2016 Richard was formally appointed as a UN Sustainable Development Goals Advocate alongside 16 others including Shakira, Paul Polman and Graça Machel.