Today's Birthday 18/1
Today's Birthday, January 18: UK actor and theatre director Sir Mark Rylance (1960 - )
He's turned down Steven Spielberg and has been named the world's greatest living actor, but most people have never heard of Mark Rylance.
The London-based thespian starred in his wife Claire van Kampen's first play Farinelli and the King when it debuted on Broadway late last year.
Van Kampen, who met Rylance when she was musical director at the National Theatre, said she didn't write the part for her husband.
"I never thought in a hundred years he would play a part in a play of mine," she told Departures magazine in February.
Born David Mark Rylance Waters in Kent, England, the Rylance family moved to the US Midwest in 1962 when he was two.
Rylance caught the theatre bug early, taking to the stage in high school before going on to study at the University of Milwaukee where his father was head of the English faculty.
Returning to the UK when he was 18, he studied acting at the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and Chrysalis Theatre School in London.
He changed his name to Mark Rylance as Mark Waters had already been taken.
Rylance's first professional role was at the Glasgow Theatre before he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, quickly becoming one of the UK's most sought-after stage actors.
His big screen debut was in the critically panned Hearts of Fire (1987), starring US singer-songwriter Bob Dylan.
A confessed fan, Rylance shares a love of music and hats.
He turned down Steven Spielberg twice when the director offered him a role in Empire of the Sun (1987), choosing instead to spend a year at the UK's National Theatre.
He used I Ching, the Chinese system of divination, to make his decision.
"I wasn't a good film actor when I was young," he later told The Independent.
"I was much too conceptual about it, much too cluttered up with ideas of what I should be doing."
When Shakespeare's Globe Theatre was re-built on the Thames, Rylance was the man picked as its first director, introducing the bard to a new generation of theatregoers between 1995 to 2005.
Rylance has received numerous industry accolades, including two Olivier Awards, three Tonys, three BAFTAs and been nominated for two Emmy awards and one Golden Globe.
He was named in Time's 100 most influential people list in 2016, the same year he won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for Steven Spielberg's Bridge of Spies. That year, he also picked up a knighthood.
The actor and director have since worked together on three other films including The BFG (2016), Dunkirk (2017) and Ready Player One (2018).
"His soul is pure," Spielberg told Time.
"He just loves to act."
