St Catharine's College, Cambridge

Richard Ellef Ayoade is a British comedian, actor, writer and director, best known for his role as Maurice Moss in The IT Crowd. Ayoade was born in... Whipps Cross, London, an only child to a Norwegian mother, Dagny , and a Nigerian father, Layide Ade Laditi Ayoade. Ayoade studied at St. Joseph's College in Ipswich, Suffolk and later studied law at St Catharine's College, Cambridge where he won the Martin Steele Prize for play production and was president of the Footlights from 1997 to 1998. While in Footlights, Ayoade acted in and wrote many shows. He and Footlights vice-president John Oliver wrote two pantomimes together: Sleeping Beauty, and Grimm Fairy Tales. Ayoade acted in both Footlights' 1997 and 1998 touring shows: Emotional Baggage and Between a Rock and a Hard Place . Ayoade co-wrote the stage show Garth Marenghi's Fright Knight with Matthew Holness, whom he also met at the Footlights, appearing in the show at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2000 where it was nominated for a Perrier Award.
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Professor Sir Peter Bernhard Hirsch FRS is a leading figure in British materials science who has made fundamental contributions to the application... of transmission electron microscopy to metals. He attended the Sloane School, Chelsea and St Catharine's College, Cambridge. In 1946 joined the Crystallography Department of the Cavendish to work for a PhD on work hardening in metals under Lawrence Bragg. He subsequently carried out important work, which is still cited, on the structure of coal. In the mid 1950s he pioneered the application of transmission electron microscopy to metals, and developed in detail the theory needed to interpret such images. In 1965, with Howie, Whelan, Pashley and Nicholson, he published the seminal text Electron microscopy of thin crystals. The following year he moved to Oxford to take up the Isaac Wolfson Chair in Metallurgy, succeeding William Hume-Rothery. He held this post until his retirement in 1992, building up the Department of Metallurgy into a world-renowned centre. Among many other honours, he was awarded the 1983 Wolf Foundation Prize in physics.
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Clarence Malcolm Lowry was an English poet and novelist who was best known for his novel Under the Volcano, which was voted No. 11 in the... Modern Library 100 Best Novels list. Lowry was born in New Brighton, Wirral, the fourth son of Arthur Lowry, a cotton broker with roots in Cumberland, and Evelyn Boden. He was educated at The Leys School and St Catharine's College, Cambridge. His home was a substantial 5-acre estate with a tennis court, small golf course and a maid who cooked for the family. Despite his comfortable upbringing, he began drinking at 14. At the age of 15 he won the junior golf championship at the famed Royal Liverpool Golf Club, Hoylake. His father expected him to go to Cambridge and enter the family business, but Malcolm wanted to experience the world, and convinced his father to let him work as a deckhand on a ship to the Far East. In May, 1927, his parents drove him to the Liverpool waterfront and, while the local press watched, waved goodbye as he set sail on the freighter S.S. Pyrrhus. The five months at sea gave him stories to incorporate into his first novel, Ultramarine.
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Sir Ian Murray McKellen, CH, CBE is an English actor. He has won multiple Laurence Olivier Awards, a Tony Award, two Academy Award nominations, and... five Emmy Award nominations. His work has spanned genres from Shakespearean and modern theatre to popular fantasy and science fiction. He is known for film roles such as Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings film trilogy, Magneto in the X-Men films, and as Sir Leigh Teabing in The Da Vinci Code. McKellen was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1979, was knighted in 1991 for services to the performing arts, and was made a Companion of Honour for services to drama and to equality, in the 2008 New Year Honours. McKellen was born in Burnley, Lancashire, England, though he spent most of his early life in Wigan. Born shortly before the outbreak of World War II, the experience had some lasting impact on him. In response to an interview question when an interviewer remarked that he seemed quite calm in the aftermath of the 11 September attacks, he said: "Well, darling, you forget — I slept under a steel plate until I was four years old.
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