mark rylance

He is a great actor, because he does not seek to attract attention, he never falls into histrionics, but simply gets into the skin of the character he has to embody.

Mark Waters – who later assumed the stage name of Rylance, not to be confused with another actor – was born in Ashford, England, in 1960, although he is of Irish ancestry, and his parents, both English teachers, moved to the United States when he was a boy, along with his two brothers, first to Connecticut and then to Wisconsin. His hobby of giving life to characters other than himself began at an early age, since as a boy he participated in school theater performances, with Shakespeare plays such as “Hamlet” and “Romeo and Juliet”, where he assumed the role major.

At the age of 18, it was clear to him that if he wanted to develop his talent on the theater stage, he had to return to his native country, so he prepared himself diligently since 1978 at the RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art) in London. Already in 1980 she made her first professional performances and in 1982 she joined the prestigious Royal Shakespeare Company. He was in good productions of the English bard’s works, but Rylance wanted more control of his work and in 1990, with his later wife, Claire van Kampen, he founded his own theater company, the Phoebus’ Cart. With Claire he has a stepdaughter, also actress Juliet Rylance .. Another second stepdaughter, Natasha, died at the young age of 28, preventing Mark from participating in the opening of the London Olympics, where he was replaced by Kenneth Branagh .

At the same time, he would go on doing his first jobs on British television, and even a brief film appearance in Hearts of Fire , in 1987, perhaps to gain experience, but without any real desire to dedicate himself fully to the small and big screen; soon after, in 1991, he was featured in baroque Peter Greenaway ‘s Prospero’s Book . His mastery of Shakespeare would lead him to be the first artistic director of London’s Shakespeare’s Globe between 1995 and 2005. And it is that in 1994 he had won the Olivier award for his work in “Much Ado About Nothing”. The Tonys did not resist him either, and he won this theater award 3 times, one of them, 2014, for another Shakespeare, “Twelfth Night”.

In cinema, his works to date have been select and with an intellectual touch, but of a certain entity, certainly not chosen at random. In 1995, accompanied by Kristin Scott Thomas , he gave life to a naturalist in Angels & Insects , and six years later he put himself under the orders of Frenchman Patrice Chéreau in Intimacy , a dissection of sexuality emptied of love. Other occasional works with a secondary presence include Las hermanas Bolena (2008) and Anonymous (2011); in the latter, the rather unshakesperean Roland Emmerich speculates on who could be the true author of Shakespeare’s works.

Television began to give him very good moments thanks to The Government Inspector (2005) and especially Wolf Hall (2015), a miniseries where he embodies Thomas Cromwell with masterful brilliance. Instead, he had the misfortune of working on the mediocre Killer Hunt (2015), which also featured Sean Penn and Javier Bardem .

The boom in the cinema is clearly due to Steven Spielberg , who affirms that “I am lucky to be able to call him a friend.” Interestingly, Rylance auditioned for Empire of the Sun years ago, and the director offered him a role in the film, but then the actor turned the offer down. After seeing him in a montage of “Twelfth Night”, Spierlberg wanted to talk to him for The Bridge of Spies , and this time he had an affirmative answer; the collaboration was so happy that it even materialized in an Oscar. Curiously, when he saw him on stage, Spielberg did not remember that this actor had been offered a role years before.

The case is without eating or drinking it, Rylance seems to have become Spielberg’s “pretty boy”, since he has persuaded him to compose a character that owes a lot to the special effects in My Friend the Giant . And also he will have him in the expected Ready Player One , science fiction around the world of video games, and in The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara , where he will give life to Pope Pius IX. As if that were not enough, he will also wage war in Dunkirk , the war film set in World War II prepared by Christopher Nolan .