Curated playlist
English male stage actors
- William ShakespeareWilliam Shakespeare signed his last will and testament on the 25th of March 1616, describing himself in it as being in "perfect health." Within a month he was dead, on the 23rd of April 1616, at the age of 52. No contemporary source…
- Jude LawJude Law was born David Jude Heyworth Law on the 29th of December 1972, in the London borough of Lewisham, and his first name came from a person none of his fans would recognise: the best friend of his father. The name everyone knows,…
- Robin Atkin DownesRobin Atkin Downes keeps a personal YouTube channel where he posts behind-the-scenes footage from his years of screen and voice work. Most people who have heard his voice have never once seen his face attached to it. He is a British actor…
- Ian McKellenIan McKellen was nine years old when his main Christmas present arrived: a fold-away wood and bakelite Victorian theatre from Pollocks Toy Theatres, complete with cardboard scenery and wire-pushed cut-outs of Cinderella and of Laurence…
- Lord Chamberlain's MenLord Chamberlain's Men gathered for the first time around 1594, in a city of roughly 200,000 people where more than 15,000 men and women attended plays every single week. London's theatrical world was in flux. Companies rose and fell with…
- Tom HardyTom Hardy walked into a modelling competition in 1998 at 21 years old and walked out with a contract. That is not how most serious actors begin. Yet within a few years, Hardy was putting on three stone of muscle to play one of Britain's…
- John GielgudOn the evening of the 20th of October 1953, John Gielgud was arrested in Chelsea for cruising for sex in a public lavatory, an act that was then a crime in Britain. He had been knighted only months earlier in the Coronation Honours. He was…
- Peter O'ToolePeter O'Toole holds a record no actor would wish for. He received eight Academy Award nominations for Best Actor across four decades, and never won a single competitive Oscar. When the Academy finally offered him an Honorary Award in 2002…
- Benedict CumberbatchBenedict Timothy Carlton Cumberbatch was born on the 19th of July 1976 at Queen Charlotte's Hospital in Hammersmith, London. His parents were both actors. His surname would eventually become one of the most recognizable in entertainment,…
- Laurence OlivierLaurence Kerr Olivier was born on the 22nd of May 1907 in Dorking, Surrey, the youngest child of a nomadic Church of England clergyman who never quite found a permanent post. By the time he was ten years old, Ellen Terry had written in her…
- Daniel Day-LewisDaniel Day-Lewis was born on the 29th of April 1957 in Kensington, London, to a poet and an actress. Before most people had ever heard his name, he was already inhabiting other people's lives so completely that crew members on film sets…
- Alan RickmanAlan Sidney Patrick Rickman was born on the 21st of February 1946 in Brentford, London, and he spent his early years in the shadow of Wormwood Scrubs Prison on an Acton council estate, raised by a mother who worked at the Post Office to…
- Alec GuinnessAlec Guinness walked onto a stage for the first time on his 20th birthday, the 2nd of April 1934, earning a single pound a week and permitted to utter just two lines. By the time he left the stage for good, on the 30th of May 1989, he had…
- Michael FlandersMichael Henry Flanders stood six feet three inches tall, was a fine oarsman and quarter-miler, and by the time he reached Oxford his contemporaries had no doubt he would become the Olivier or Donat of his generation. His biographer and…
- Henry CondellWilliam Shakespeare bequeathed Henry Condell money for a mourning ring. So did Augustine Phillips. Nicholas Tooley and Alexander Cooke went further, naming Condell as trustee for their estates. Such a concentration of trust, inside one…
- Ben KingsleyBen Kingsley was born Krishna Pandit Bhanji on the 31st of December 1943, in Snainton, North Riding of Yorkshire. He carries within him a world of contradictions: a Quaker raised by a Gujarati Khoja father who practised Ismaili Shia Islam,…
- Idris ElbaIdris Elba was born Idrissa Akuna Elba on the 6th of September 1972 in the London Borough of Hackney, the only child of a Sierra Leonean father who worked at the Ford Dagenham plant and a Ghanaian mother. He grew up in Hackney and East…
- Patrick StewartPatrick Stewart grew a moustache for the role of Macbeth, and when he looked in the mirror just before going on stage, he saw his father's face staring straight back at him. His father, Alfred Stewart, was a regimental sergeant major in…
- Andy SerkisAndy Serkis was born Andrew Clement Serkis on the 20th of April 1964, in Ruislip Manor, Middlesex. His father, Clement, was an Iraqi-Armenian gynaecologist whose family had originally gone by the name Serkisian. His mother, Lylie Weech,…
- William KempeWilliam Kempe was the most famous clown in Elizabethan England, and almost nobody today knows his name. He performed alongside William Shakespeare and Richard Burbage. He morris danced 110 miles from London to Norwich to prove he could. He…
- Richard BurbageRichard Burbage played Hamlet, Othello, Richard III, King Lear, and Macbeth, all in their first-ever performances, and yet most people today have never heard his name. When he died on the 13th of March 1619, the public grief was so intense…
- John HemingesJohn Heminges appears in Shakespeare's will alongside two other men. Richard Burbage and Henry Condell each received the same bequest: 26 shillings and eightpence to buy a mourning ring. Of those three, only Heminges and Condell were still…
- Robert ArminRobert Armin stepped onto the Globe stage in August 1600, and nothing about the clown in English theatre was ever quite the same again. He was, on paper, the replacement for Will Kempe, who had just left the Lord Chamberlain's Men under…
- Simon CallowSimon Callow was born on the 15th of June 1949 in Streatham, South London, and his path into acting began not in a classroom or a casting office, but with a fan letter. A teenage Callow wrote to Laurence Olivier, then the artistic director…