Famous Brits Born Overseas Trivia Quiz

Answer: France

Given her name are you surprised that Hermione Granger was born in France? Emma Watson was born in Paris in 1990 to British parents who were both lawyers. When her parents divorced, she and her mother moved to Oxfordshire. At age 9 she was selected to play the role of Hermione Granger in the series of "Harry Potter" movies. Following that she has continued her acting career and has become a spokesperson for women's rights.

Answer: Belgium

Eliza Doolittle apparently wasn't a Cockney lass, but a Belgian. Audrey Hepburn was born in Brussels, Begium in 1929 to a British father, Joseph Ruston, and a Dutch mother. At some point in her childhood, her father changed the family surname to Hepburn-Ruston.

Her childhood was spent in Begium, England, and the Netherlands. Later aftwer her father developed strong Fascist leanings and isolated himself from his family. Hepburn and her mother settled in Kent.

Answer: Kenya

Chris Froome, a winner of multiple Tour de France cycling races, was born in Nairobi, Kenya to British parents who had moved from Gloucestershire to run a farm in Kenya. He grew up in Kenya, but attended school in South Africa. His career as a cyclist began in Africa and he raced as part of the Kenyan team in the Commonwealth Games.

He had early success as a key domestique for Sir Bradley Wiggins on the Sky Racing team in major cycling events and later took the role as team leader, winning the Tour de France in 2013, 2015, 2016, and 2017.

Answer: Tanzania (Zanzibar)

Freddie Mercury (Farrokh Bulsara) was born in 1946 in what was the Sultanate of Zanzibar to parents of Parsi descent, originally from India; and he was sent to India for his schooling. His father, who worked for the British Foreign Office, moved the family to England due to unrest in Zanzibar. Mercury was the lead singer and guiding force for the band Queen. Noted for his four-octave singing voice and his flamboyant lifestyle, he died of complications from AIDS at age 45.

Answer: Egypt

Cecil Louis Troughton Smith was born in Cairo in 1899. He wrote under the pseudonym of C.S. Forester, including the Horatio Hornblower series of books and "The African Queen".

Answer: Somalia

Mo Farah was born in Mogadishu, Somalia in 1983 and grew up in the country of Djibouti. At age 8 he joined his father, a British citizen, in London and soon displayed his prowess in athletics. He won Olympic gold medals in both the 5000 and 10,000 meter races in the 2012 and 2016 Olympic Games.

Answer: Yemen (Colony of Aden)

Eddie Izzard was born in 1962 in what was then the Colony of Aden and is now part of Yemen. His father was an accountant for British Petroleum and his mother was a midwife. Soon after his birth his parents moved their family to Wales. Since then he has become a comedian and political activist.

Answer: India

A number of noted English celebrities were born in India, including Vivian Leigh, Julie Christie, Eric Blair (a.k.a. George Orwell), and Cliff Richards. Rudyard Kipling was born in 1865 in Mumbai to British parents who had moved to India. He was sent to boarding school in England, but returned to India when he felt his chances of matriculating at Oxford were small.

His father helped him get a job working for a small local newspaper. Kipling had a successful career as a journalist and started to write novels, such as "The Jungle Book" and "Kim", and poems, such as "Gunga Din" and "If".

He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907.

Answer: China

Eric Liddell was born in Tientsin, China to missionary parents. At age 6 he and his sister were sent to England for education, and he soon developed a reputation for his skill in rugby and running. The movie "Chariots of Fire" documents his experience at the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris. Due to his religious convictions, Lidell chose not to run his best event, the 100 meter race, since the finals were held on a Sunday.

Instead he ran in the 200 meter race and his weakest event, the 400 meters. He won the bronze medal in the 200 and the gold medal in the 400. He later returned to China as a missionary.

As hostilities with Japan increased, he sent his wife and children home to England. Later he was held in a Japanese prison camp, where he died of an inoperable brain tumor - although malnourishment probably hastened his death.

Answer: South Africa

Tolkien was born in 1892 in Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State (later South Africa). At age 3 his mother went with her children to England for what had been planned as a long trip. However, his father died before he could join them. His mother alienated her family when she converted to Roman Catholicism. Tolkien was 12 years old when she died of diabetes; and he was left to the care of Father Francis Morgan.

Tolkien is best known for his "Lord of the Rings" trilogy and "The Hobbit"; however many scholars consider his translation of Beowulf, published posthumously, as his most important work.
Tolkien was a very good friend of the write C.S. Lewis and was instrumental in his conversion to Christianity.
The actor Basil Rathbone is another notable Englishman born in South Africa.

Answer: Canada

William Maxwell Aitken, later titled Lord Beaverbrook, was born in Ontario, Canada in 1879. He was a very successful businessman from his early youth and became a millionaire before age 30 in Canada. His original business interest were insurance and journalism, but he soon engineered business deals, the most notable being control of the Canadian cement industry.
He moved to England in 1910, was elected to the House of Commons, and built his newspaper empire centered on "The Daily Express".

Answer: Greece

Prince Philip was born in Corfu Greece in 1921. Prince Andrew, his father, was the seventh child of King George I of Greece and was married to Princess Alice of Battenberg, the great granddaughter of Queen Victoria of England. Philip was also the grandson of King Christian IX of Denmark. Prince Andrew and his family were forced to leave Greece during the Greco-Turkish War when Philip was an infant. Philip enlisted in the Royal Navy in 1939.

When he married Princess Elizabeth in 1947, he renounced his distant claims to the thrones of Greece and Denmark.

Answer: New Zealand

Ernest Rutherford, known as the father of Nuclear Physics, was born in Brightwater, New Zealand in 1871. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1908 for his work with alpha particles and developed the concept of the half-life of radioactive elements. He moved to England for postgraduate work at the Cavendish Lab at Cambridge University.

His work with radio waves paralleled that of Marconi, and Rutherford later did extensive work in the field of sonar waves.

Answer: United States

Nancy Langhorne was born in 1879 in Danville, Virginia. She had a failed marriage at age 18 to American socialite Robert Gould Shaw before departing to England. Her good looks and sparkling wit made her popular in English society and eventually remarried to Waldorf Astor. When Astor's father died, he inherited the family peerage in the House of Lords; and she successfully won his seat in the House of Commons.

Being the first woman elected to Parliament was a noteworthy achievement; although Lady Astor was quite controversial due to her religious intolerance and acerbic wit. (Several exchanges between her and Winston Churchill have become legendary).

Answer: Italy

Giovanni Cabuto was born around 1450 in Italy. He sailed for Venice in the Mediterranean and Mid East, but a serious debt problem forced him to flee Venice to Spain initially. His problems continued there and he settled in England where King Henry VII granted him the right to raise funds to explore North America in 1496.

He sailed from Bristol to the present province of Newfoundland on what is considered to be the first British exploration of North America.