Mark Rylance
Sir David Mark Rylance Waters is an English actor, playwright and theatre director. Known for his work on stage and screen, he has received numerous awards including an Academy Award, three BAFTA Awards, two Olivier Awards and three Tony Awards. In 2016 he was included in the Time 100 list of the world's most influential people. In 2017 he was made a knight by Queen Elizabeth II.
Between 1995 and 2005 Rylance was the first artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe in London. He appeared in the West End productions of Much Ado About Nothing in 1994 and Jerusalem in 2010, winning the Olivier Award for Best Actor for both. He has also appeared on Broadway, winning three Tony Awards: two for Best Actor for Boeing Boeing in 2008 and Jerusalem in 2011, and one for Best Featured Actor for Twelfth Night in 2014. He was Tony-nominated for his roles in Richard III in 2014 and Farinelli and the King in 2017.
Rylance's film roles include Prospero's Books, Intimacy, The Other Boleyn Girl and Steven Spielberg's Bridge of Spies, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He subsequently collaborated with Spielberg acting in The BFG and Ready Player One. He also appeared in Dunkirk, The Trial of the Chicago 7, Bones and All and The Outfit.
On television, Rylance won the British Academy Television Award for Best Actor for his role as David Kelly in the 2005 Channel 4 drama The Government Inspector and for playing Thomas Cromwell in the 2015 BBC Two mini-series Wolf Hall; for the latter role, he received Emmy Award and Golden Globe Award nominations. He completed his portrayal of Cromwell in the 2024 sequel Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light.
Rylance is a patron of the London International Festival of Theatre; of the London-based charity Peace Direct, which supports peace-builders in areas of conflict; and of the Stop the War Coalition.
Early life and education
Rylance was born as David Mark Waters on 18 January 1960 in Ashford, Kent, to Anne and David Waters, both teachers of English. One of his grandmothers was Irish. Both of his grandfathers were British POWs of the Japanese in the Second World War. His maternal grandfather, Osmond Skinner, spent decades as a banker with the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank. After being shot in the stomach during the Battle of Hong Kong, Skinner was recuperating when he witnessed the St. Stephen's College massacre.Rylance's parents moved to the US in 1962; first to Connecticut, then to Wisconsin in 1969, where his father and mother taught English at the University School of Milwaukee, which Rylance attended until his graduation in 1978, when he returned to England. Rylance has a sister named Susannah, an opera singer and author, and a deceased brother, Jonathan, who was a sommelier at Chez Panisse.
When in Milwaukee, acting mentor Dale Gutzman cast Rylance in a variety of roles before he relocated to London to train at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art from 1978 to 1980. Due to his time in Wisconsin Rylance had developed an American accent, claiming, "when I arrived in London at RADA, I was treated as the American". He took the stage name of Mark Rylance because his given name, Mark Waters, was already taken by someone else registered with Equity.
Career
1980–1999: Royal Shakespeare Company and Shakespeare's Globe
In 1980 Rylance gained his professional acting debut in the Shaun Lawton play Desperado Corner at the Glasgow Citizens' Theatre in Glasgow, Scotland, where he acted in a variety of plays as well as organising his own experimental theatre group.In 1982 and 1983 he performed in numerous productions at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon and London. During this time he acted in productions of The Taming of the Shrew, The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream. He received his first Laurence Olivier Award nomination in the Best Supporting Actor in a Play category for his portrayal of Michael in Arden of Faversham at the 1983 Laurence Olivier Awards. In 1988 Rylance played Hamlet with the RSC in Ron Daniels' production that toured Ireland and Britain for a year. The play then ran in Stratford-upon-Avon. Hamlet toured the US for two years. In 1990 Rylance and Claire van Kampen founded "Phoebus' Cart", their own theatre company. The following year, the company staged The Tempest on the road.
In 1995 Rylance became the first artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, a post he held until 2005. Rylance directed and acted in every season, in works by Shakespeare and others, including an all-male production of Twelfth Night, in which he played Olivia, and Richard III in the title role. Under his directorate, new plays were also performed at the Globe, the first being Augustine's Oak by Peter Oswald, the writer-in-residence, which was performed in 1999. A second play by Oswald followed in 2002: The Golden Ass or the Curious Man.
Rylance played the lead in Gillies MacKinnon's film The Grass Arena, and won the Radio Times Award for Best Newcomer. In 1993 he starred in Matthew Warchus' production of Much Ado About Nothing at the Queen's Theatre, produced by Thelma Holt. His Benedick won him an Olivier Award for Best Actor.
2000–2009: Broadway debut and acclaim
For his role as Jay in Intimacy, directed by Patrice Chéreau, he received real, rather than simulated, fellatio. He took the leading role as British weapons expert David Kelly in Peter Kosminsky's The Government Inspector, an award-winning Channel 4 production for which he won the British Academy Television Award for Best Actor in 2005. That same year, Oswald's third play written for the Globe was first performed: The Storm, an adaptation of Plautus comedy Rudens – "argu" one of the sources of Shakespeare's The Tempest. Other historical first nights were organised by Rylance while director of the Globe including Twelfth Night performed in 2002 at Middle Temple, to commemorate its first performance there exactly 400 years before, and Measure for Measure at Hampton Court in summer 2004. In 2007 he received a Sam Wanamaker Award together with his wife Claire van Kampen, Director of Music, and Jenny Tiramani, Director of Costume Design, for the founding work during the opening ten years at Shakespeare's Globe.In 2007 Rylance wrote and starred in The BIG Secret Live 'I am Shakespeare' Webcam Daytime Chatroom Show , which toured England in 2007. On 8 September 2007 Derek Jacobi and Rylance unveiled a Declaration of Reasonable Doubt on the authorship of William Shakespeare's work, after the final matinée performance of The Big Secret Live "I am Shakespeare" Webcam Daytime Chat-Room Show in Chichester. The actual author of Shakespeare's plays is variously proposed to be Christopher Marlowe; Francis Bacon; Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford; or Mary Sidney. The declaration named 20 prominent doubters of the past, including Mark Twain, John Gielgud, Charlie Chaplin and actor Leslie Howard, and was made by the Shakespeare Authorship Coalition duly signed online by 300 people to begin new research. Jacobi and Rylance presented a copy of the document to William Leahy, head of English at Brunel University London.
In 2016 the writer Ben Elton delivered a riposte to this "batty" premise in the episode "If You Prick Us, Do We Not Bleed" of his television comedy Upstart Crow. The great but "self-regarding and pretentious" actor Wolf Hall joins Burbage's acting company to play Shylock. The character Wolf Hall confronts Shakespeare with the suggestion that he didn't write his own plays; it is a satirical portrait of Rylance and his opinion.
In 2007 Rylance performed in Boeing-Boeing in London. In 2008 he reprised the role on Broadway and won Drama Desk and Tony Awards for his performance. In 2009 Rylance won the Critics' Circle Theatre Award Best Actor, 2009 for his role of Johnny Byron in Jez Butterworth's play Jerusalem at the Royal Court Theatre in London.
2010–2019: Career expansion
In 2010 Rylance starred in a revival of David Hirson's verse play La Bête. The play ran first at London's Comedy Theatre before transferring to the Music Box Theatre on Broadway, on 23 September 2010. Also in 2010 he won another Olivier award for best actor in the role of Johnny Byron in Jerusalem at the Apollo Theatre in London. In 2011 he won his second Tony Award for playing the same role in the Broadway production. In 2013 Shakespeare's Globe brought two all-male productions to Broadway, starring Rylance as Olivia in Twelfth Night and in the title role in Richard III, for a limited run in repertory. He won his third Tony Award for his performance as Olivia and was nominated for his performance as Richard III.He played Thomas Cromwell in Wolf Hall, BBC Two's adaptation of Hilary Mantel's historical novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. For his performance, he was nominated for numerous accolades including the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie, the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Miniseries or Television Film and the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Miniseries or Television Movie. Rylance was featured as the castaway on the BBC radio programme Desert Island Discs on 15 February 2015.
Rylance co-starred in the biographical drama Bridge of Spies, released in October 2015, directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Hanks, Amy Ryan, and Alan Alda. The film is about the 1960 U-2 Incident and the arrest and conviction of Soviet spy Rudolf Abel and the exchange of Abel for U-2 pilot Gary Powers. Rylance, who had previously turned down a role offered by Spielberg in the 1987 film Empire of the Sun, plays Abel and has received unanimous universal acclaim for his performance, with many critics claiming it as the best performance of 2015. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch quoted, "As the deeply principled Donovan, Hanks deftly balances earnestness and humour. And Rylance's spirited performance is almost certain to yield an Oscar nomination." David Edelstein from New York cited 'It's Rylance who keeps Bridge of Spies standing. He gives a teeny, witty, fabulously non-emotive performance, every line musical and slightly ironic – the irony being his forthright refusal to deceive in a world founded on lies." Rylance won the Academy Award, BAFTA Award, and New York Film Critics Circle Award in the Best Supporting Actor categories, as well as receiving Golden Globe Award and Screen Actors Guild Award nominations, among other wins and nominations.
Rylance co-wrote and starred in the comedy play Nice Fish, the first version of which premiered at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis in 2013, then underwent substantial revision. On 17 January 2016, the revised play received its premiere production at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which then transferred to St. Ann's Warehouse, New York. In November 2016, the production opened at the Harold Pinter Theatre in London's West End.
Rylance played the title role in Spielberg's The BFG, a film adaptation of the children's book by Roald Dahl. Filming took place in 2015, and the film was released in July 2016. Rylance had a major role in Christopher Nolan's 2017 action-thriller Dunkirk, based on the British military evacuation of the French city of Dunkirk in 1940 during the Second World War. The film co-starred Tom Hardy, Kenneth Branagh, Cillian Murphy and Harry Styles. In 2018 Rylance made his third collaboration with Spielberg acting playing James Halliday in the science-fiction epic film Ready Player One. That same year Rylance starred in Farinelli and the King on the Broadway stage earning a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play, his fifth career Tony Award nomination. Later that year 2018, he appeared in Waiting for the Barbarians, alongside Johnny Depp and Robert Pattinson. In June 2019, he resigned from the Royal Shakespeare Company due to its sponsorship deal with BP. He last appeared on stage for the RSC in 1989.