Happy New Year to all JN-friends here!
Today I scrolled through internet to look if there is some sort of six degrees of JN and Kenneth Branagh and I found two links. (Could very well be you know them already) The first is about a Gosford-Park fansite which contains quite a lot of information when you click on the menu items, enjoy!
http://www.loony-archivist.com/gosford/notes_ivor.htm

The other site is from 1995, therefor ages ago but I think it interesting. Here is the JN-related text, the link contains infos about all the "candidates".
http://www.nytimes.com/1995/01/01/movies/film-who-will-be-the-new-ralph-fiennes-the-next-hugh-grant.html?pagewanted=all

Jeremy Northam At Home In a Waistcoat

Jeremy Northam is famous in London for being the 27-year-old understudy called upon to finish the title performance in "Hamlet" that September night in 1989 when Daniel Day-Lewis had an emotional breakdown. It happened during the ghost scene, when Mr. Day-Lewis left the stage of the Olivier auditorium, never to return.

The following spring, Mr. Northam won the Olivier Award -- the British equivalent of the Tony -- for outstanding newcomer for his Edward Voysey, the moral pivot of the Royal National Theater revival of the 1905 play "The Voysey Inheritance." That performance confirmed him in critics' eyes as a favorite period player -- a contemporary actor at home in Edwardian waistcoats and starched collars. In October, he finished a run in William Wycherley's "Country Wife" at the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he also appeared last season in "Love's Labour's Lost."

The youngest of four children, whose father was an Ibsen scholar, Mr. Northam has been singled out by critics and colleagues for his intelligence, though he dismisses the idea. "I certainly don't consider myself an intellectual," he says, although he attended the highly respected Bristol Old Vic Theater School. "What I enjoy so much about rehearsals is you suddenly hit upon something and there's no explanation, no planning."

Mr. Northam's film work includes a small part in the 1992 Paramount remake of Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights," with Mr. Fiennes as Heathcliff. (The film, never released in theaters in the United States, was shown last month on TNT.) He has a small part in "Carrington," playing the seafaring adventurer Bernard (Beacus) Penrose. And in "Voices From a Locked Room," completed last month, Mr. Northam stars as the British composer Peter Warlock.

His brooding features convey what Mr. Hampton, the director of "Carrington," calls "a very saturnine, dark quality."

"Jeremy," he says, "is capable of a real sort of evil glamour."