Stephen Fry feels "startled and enchanted" after being knighted in the New Year Honours

He has been president of the charity Mind since 2011 and Vice-President of conservation charity Fauna and Flora International since 2009.

He also works with the Terence Higgins Trust, raising awareness and funds for people with HIV and Aids. but insisted the award came "out of the blue".

He said: "What I feel very proud of doing and very pleased to be able to do... because it goes all the way back to my own terrible, worst kind of experiences of what a mental health illness, mental illness can do to one, how it can completely ruin one's life, one's happiness, one's sense of self.

"And how without diagnosis and help and recognition, one can think one is a cursed individual and that there is something deeply wrong with one as a person, which we never think if you're an asthmatic or a diabetic or have some other chronic illness.

"You don't think that makes me a bad person, but because our mind is what supposedly controls our speech and our behaviour and our characteristics, it's all too easy to think that a mental illness is somehow something deeper and more to do with a failure inside.

"It's an incredibly important field and everybody from the King and his children have made it part of their work to talk about it, and other people in the public eye have been open about it, and so I'm really pleased that it's in the citation that my presidency of Mind is one of the things that has been recognised."

Meanwhile, actress Carmen Munroe, 92, receives a damehood for her services to drama with Sarah Lancashire, 60, and Carey Mulligan, 39, being made CBEs (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) along with celebrity gardener Alan Titchmarsh, 75.

Anne Marie Duff, 54, has been made an OBE (Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire), along with Eddie Marsan, 56 and Kevin Whately, 73.

Myleene Klass, 46, is "absolutely over the moon" after she was made MBE (Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) for services to women's health, miscarriage awareness and to charity.

Other notable names included on the list are Gareth Southgate, 54, former England football manager, who receives a knighthood, along with former Wales and British Irish Lions winger Gerald Davies, 79.