Sherlock star Benedict Cumberbatch fended off queries about his unborn baby in a TV interview and admitted his female fans made him "squirm" when they called themselves Cumberbitches.

The actor, tipped for an Oscar nomination for his performance as codebreaker Alan Turing in The Imitation Game, told US chatshow host Ellen DeGeneres that he and his partner, Sophie Hunter, did not know the sex of their baby yet.

He told her: "We're gonna have some kind of baby."

Cumberbatch was questioned about his female fans and admitted: "It's like squeezing a confession out of me to actually say that word. I kind of squirm a little bit about it."

He told DeGeneres he had a "problem" with the name initially, saying: "I just went, ladies, this is wonderful, I'm very flattered, but has this not set feminism back a little bit?

"Empower yourselves if you're going to get silly about a guy with maybe a little bit more of a, sort of, you know, a high-regard, self-regard thing. But yeah, they were very sweet. They wrote back and were, like, well, we didn't mean any harm to feminism, we1re just having a little bit of fun with your name."