Mark Rylance (born January 18, 1960) is an award-winning English actor, theatre director and playwright.
As an actor, Rylance found success on stage and screen. For his work in theatre he has won Olivier and Tony Awards among others, and a BAFTA TV Award. His film roles include Ferdinand in Prospero's Books (after a play by William Shakespeare), Jay in Intimacy (after a novel by Hanif Kureishi) and Jakob van Gunten in Institute Benjamenta (after a novel by Robert Walser).
He was the first Artistic Director of Shakespeare's Globe in London, from 1995 to 2005.
Rylance was born David Mark Rylance Waters in England, the son of David and Anne (Skinner) Waters, both English teachers (as an adult, he took the stage name of Mark Rylance because the name Mark Waters was already taken by someone else registered with Actors Equity). In 1962, when he was two, his parents moved to Connecticut in the United States and in 1969, to Wisconsin, where his father was headmaster at a prestigious preparatory school, the University School of Milwaukee. Rylance later attended the school, where he began acting. His first notable role was Hamlet in a 1976 production (with his own father as the First Gravedigger), and the next year Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream, during the First Shakespeare Festival at his father's school.
In 1992 he married Claire van Kampen whom he met while working at the National Theatre. His step-daughter is actress Juliet Rylance.
With considerable juvenile experience already in hand, Rylance won a scholarship by audition to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA) in London. There he trained from 1978-1980 under Hugh Cruttwell, and with Barbara Bridgmont at the Chrysalis Theatre School, Balham, London. In 1980 he got his first professional work at the Glasgow Citizens' Theatre.
In 1982 and 1983, Rylance performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) both in Stratford upon Avon and London.
In 1988, Rylance played Hamlet with the RSC in Ron Daniels' acclaimed production that toured Ireland and England for a year. The play then ran in Stratford-upon-Avon, where Mark alternated Hamlet with Romeo in the production of Romeo and Juliet that inaugurated the rebuilt Swan theatre in Stratford. Hamlet toured to the United States for two years.
In 1990, Rylance and van Kampen founded "Phoebus' Cart", their own theatre company. The following year, the company staged The Tempest on the road in unique, unusual sites.
Also in 1991, Rylance played the lead in Gillies Mackinnon's film The Grass Arena (1991), and won the BBC 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.
In 2007, Rylance performed in Boeing Boeing in London. In 2008, he reprised the role on Broadway and subsequently won Drama Desk and Tony Awards for his performance. For his acceptance speech for the Tony, Rylance read from a work by poet Louis Jenkins.
In 2008 he will play the Nurse in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet for his step-daughter's company Theatre of Memory at Middle Temple in London.
In 1995, Rylance was named first Artistic Director of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, a role he would serve until 2005.
On September 8, 2007, Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance unveiled a Declaration of Reasonable Doubt on the authorship of Shakespeare's work, after the final matinee of I am Shakespeare, a play in Chichester, England.
The "real" author was identified as Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon, the Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere, or Mary Sidney (Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke). The declaration named 20 prominent doubters of the past, including Mark Twain, Orson Welles, Sir John Gielgud and Charlie Chaplin and was made by Shakespeare Authorship Coalition duly signed online by 300 people to begin a new research. Jacobi and Rylance presented a copy of the document to William Leahy, head of English at Brunel University, London.
Rylance wrote (co-conceived by John Dove) and starred in The BIG Secret Live—I am Shakespeare—Webcam Daytime Chatroom Show (A comedy of Shakespearean identity crisis) which toured England in 2007.
