Kwame Kwei-Armah (born Ian Roberts; 24 March 1967 in Hillingdon, London) is a British actor, playwright, director, singer and broadcaster. He is best known for playing paramedic Finlay Newton in the BBC medical drama Casualty from 1999 until 2004. In 2005 he became the second black Briton to have a play staged in the West End of London. (In 1990, Ray Harrison Graham's Fringe First award-winning play Gary played at the Arts Theatre.) Kwei-Armah's award-winning piece Elmina's Kitchen transferred to the Garrick Theatre in 2005. He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2012 Birthday Honours for services to drama. He is currently the artistic director of the Young Vic theatre in London, succeeding David Lan. Brought up in Southall, West London, 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. Kwei-Armah was chancellor of the University of the Arts from 2011 to 2015. He served as the Artistic Director of Baltimore's Center Stage Theater in the United States from 2011 to 2018. In 2018 he became the Artistic Director of the Young Vic in London. Early life Kwei-Armah was born in Hillingdon Hospital, in London, England, 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, descendant 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 let two rooms to help to pay for the mortgage. 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