Curated playlist
Critics' Circle Theatre Award winners
- Jude LawJude Law dropped out of school at 17 to become an actor. It led to an Oscar nomination for The Talented Mr. Ripley.
- Ian McKellenIan McKellen came out as gay on BBC radio in 1988, while Parliament weighed Section 28.
- Rachel WeiszRachel Weisz first made headlines in 1984 by saying no. She was a teenage model who had started working at the age of 14, and she turned down an offer to star in King David opposite Richard Gere. The British actress, born on the 7th of…
- Anthony HopkinsAnthony Hopkins once delivered a seven-page courtroom speech in a single take on the set of Steven Spielberg's Amistad. The crew was astonished. Spielberg was so overawed that he could not bring himself to call the actor Tony, and he…
- Benedict CumberbatchA play titled Benedict Cumberbatch Must Die was meant as a love letter to his fans.
- Kenneth BranaghKenneth Branagh won an Oscar for a film about the Belfast he fled at age nine. He won Best Original Screenplay in 2022.
- Andrew GarfieldAndrew Garfield, the English and American actor born on the 20th of August 1983, very nearly never acted at all. He had planned to study business. At 16, a friend talked him into taking theatre studies at A-level, because the class was…
- Judi DenchJudi Dench won an Oscar for a role that lasted about eight minutes. She played Queen Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love.
- Tom StoppardTom Stoppard arrived in England knowing not a word of Czech. He fled Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia as a child.
- Kevin SpaceyLate in the 1995 thriller Se7en, Kevin Spacey walks into the story as the serial killer John Doe, and most of the audience had no idea he was coming. His name was missing from the opening credits. It was missing from the film's…