Curated playlist
Laurence Olivier Award winners
- Andrew Lloyd WebberAndrew Lloyd Webber walked into Her Majesty's Theatre on the 11th of February 2012 to mark a milestone that no Broadway show had ever reached: the 10,000th performance of The Phantom of the Opera. The run would continue for another decade…
- 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…
- 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…
- Eugene O'NeillEugene O'Neill died the same way he was born: in a hotel room. As he whispered his last words at the Sheraton Hotel in Boston on the 27th of November 1953, he said, "I knew it. I knew it. Born in a hotel room and died in a hotel room." It…
- 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,…
- Arthur MillerArthur Miller died on the evening of the 10th of February 2005 - the fifty-sixth anniversary of the Broadway debut of Death of a Salesman. The symmetry was almost too neat for a man who wrote plays about men crushed by the weight of their…
- Judi DenchJudi Dench stood on stage at the Academy Awards in 1999 and, clutching her Oscar, quipped that for eight minutes of screen time she should only get a little bit of the statuette. That self-deprecating remark captured something real. Her…
- Jonathan PryceJonathan Pryce was born John Price on the 1st of June 1947 in Carmel, Flintshire, the son of a former coal miner who ran a small grocery shop. He grew up Welsh Presbyterian, attended Holywell Grammar School, and briefly trained to be a…
- 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…
- Willy RussellWilly Russell was born on the 23rd of August 1947 in Whiston, Lancashire, and by the time he was fifteen he had left school to become a women's hairdresser. That is not where most stories about celebrated playwrights begin. Yet before…
- 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…
- Tom StoppardTom Stoppard was born Tomáš Sträussler in Zlín, Czechoslovakia, on the 3rd of July 1937, and he died on the 29th of November 2025, at his home in Dorset, England. He was 88. King Charles, in his tribute, quoted a line from Stoppard's own…
- Barbara DicksonBarbara Ruth Dickson started her career singing in folk clubs around Fife in 1964. She was born on the 27th of September 1947 in Dunfermline. The Scotsman newspaper has described her as Scotland's best-selling female singer for chart…