“Previously on Wolf Hall…” It’s been nine years since Claire Foy memorably trembled her way to the block as Anne Boleyn, recapped at the start of the second and final season of the BBC’s handsome Hilary Mantel adaptation. It’s a deathbound affair for all, though.The author herself is now dead; the original actor playing the Duke of Norfolk, Bernard Hill, as well, with Timothy Spall taking his place. Henry VIII’s pustulant leg has reduced his gait to an ominous slow limp; Jane Seymour – whom, the cross-cutting in Peter Straughan’s script suggests, he seems to be marrying concurrently with Read more ...

As an actor, Mark Rylance specialises in outsiders and eccentrics, outliers of one kind or another. He identified and developed his latest character himself, based on the real-life, mid-19th century Hungarian doctor whose pioneering, lifesaving discoveries were long ignored by the medical Establishment – who in his lifetime was a tragic pariah rather than the hero he should have been. A perfect fit, perhaps. And yet the challenge of dramatising Semmelweis’s story is a tricky one, given a central character who was his own worse enemy and appears to have lacked anything like Read more ...

“A man walks in,” Leonard (Mark Rylance) begins. “What about him can you observe? What does a man like to be? And who is he underneath?” Leonard is, in common parlance, a Savile Row tailor – “a cutter from the Row,” he insists – fetched up for murky reasons in 1958 Chicago, where his shop’s best customers are sharp-dressed Mob clan the Boyles. He affects innocence of their business, till scion Richie (Dylan O’Brien) and rival Francis (Johnny Flynn, pictured below) stagger through the door after a bloody shoot-out. A long night of subterfuge and double-cross, poker-faces and slipping masks Read more ...

“No one can say you didn’t try,” shipyard worker Maurice Flitcroft (Mark Rylance) is told, shortly before bluffing his way aged 46 into the 1976 British Open, having never played golf before. The British love of the underdog is our popular cinema’s most appealing trait, valuing dreamers and chancers over power and glory, and the real life Maurice certainly fits the bill. Rylance makes him slow-talking but not quite slow-witted, a sometimes wry, sometimes naïve holy fool, eccentric but always moral; his speech patterns seem to calmly navigate constant unseen obstacles, much like his stoically Read more ...

Dr Semmelweis, a star vehicle for Mark Rylance, one of Britain’s most versatile and talented actors, fills the Bristol Old Vic with a dizzying kaleidoscope of words, sounds and images. Tom Morris – the theatre’s energetic and inventive director – and his team have created a show that combines physical theatre, dance, the live music of a string quartet, and a sparingly used revolving stage to dazzling effect. The text is a collaboration between Rylance and writer Stephen Brown.The story focuses on the revolutionary work of Dr Semmelweis, a mid-19th century Hungarian doctor who discovered that Read more ...

Claire van Kampen has a history of providing roles for her husband, Mark Rylance. He starred in her critically acclaimed Farinelli and the King three years ago, and now she directs him as Iago in the Globe's production of Othello, with Moonlight actor André Holland as the eponymous general.Rylance (pictured below) has much more Globe experience, but Holland's Shakespearen pedigree is strong too – he's a veteran of New York's Shakespeare in the Park, so very much at home delivering iambic pentameter in the open air. His soft Alabama accent serves to separate him from the rest of the cast, Read more ...

Mark Rylance was once renowned for skipping thank yous to agents, friends and everyone he’s ever met in award speeches and instead giving us a blast of Minnesotan prose poet Louis Jenkins. Now the two men have co-created an oddball meditation, first seen in New York earlier this year, in which comedy meets soul-searching on an untethered frozen lake.Rylance the writer has given Rylance the actor a typically Rylance part: charmingly guileless and gormless Ron, the loquacious and gently dotty companion of serious fisherman Erik (Jim Lichtscheidl), whose suffering of this irksome presence Read more ...

Two cultural giants from different spheres align to occasionally sublime results in The BFG. Steven Spielberg's film locates the beatific in its (literally) outsized star, Mark Rylance, but lapses into the banal when its eponymous Big Friendly Giant – Roald Dahl's 1982 literary creation made motion-capture fresh – isn't careering across the screen.As a sort of companion piece to E.T., which shares this film's screenwriter, Melissa Mathison, who died last year, the film brings an otherworldly presence into our world of the everyday. And yet there remains something pro forma about the abiding Read more ...

Nostalgia for the good old days of mutually assured destruction? You’d have got long odds on such a thing on 9 November 1989, the day the Berlin Wall was breached. A quarter of a century on, the Americans and the Russians are entangled in a whole other theatre of war in which the idea of negotiating with the enemy is unthinkable. The Soviets may have been abominable commie bastards but, hey, our guys could still clink a glass with them. So Steven Spielberg is able to visit the Cold War in something like a spirit of levity.Bridge of Spies is much more overtly an entertainment than Schindler’s Read more ...

No doubt this sophisticated bagatelle starring Mark Rylance worked like a charm in the intimate space and woody resonance of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. The Duke of York's Theatre is one of the West End’s smaller mainstream venues, its proscenium arch is appropriate to the early 18th century operatic world in which castrato Farinelli made a fortune enchanting his audiences, and the recreation of the Southwark gem onstage with its ranks of candles in chandeliers as well as footlights and its pretty boxes has been perfectly achieved by Jonathan Fensom for the transfer of John Dove’s production Read more ...

Wolf Hall divided viewers from the off. It mesmerised many and left a vocal minority cold, for whom apparently - mystifyingly - it has all been a bit dull. The dialogue was too elliptical, the politics tricksy and convoluted (who is this Holy Roman Emperor anyway?), there was a surfeit of men called Thomas and women stitching in bay windows and big dresses. And to cap it all director Peter Kosminsky, fetishising Mark Rylance’s inscrutable face, seemed to want every take to carry on into next week.In the end, the rewards for loyalty were rich, and never more than in the adaptation's final Read more ...

Going into this programme, it dawned on me that I knew next to nothing about Mark Rylance's background – where he came from, who his parents were, what he does in his personal life. Having reached the end credits I was little the wiser, other than having learned that he has a wife called Claire, since none of it fell within the purview of Melvyn Bragg's interviewing.But I suppose there's always Wikipedia for the other stuff, and Bragg's close focus on Rylance the actor and his main spheres of thespian activity paid its own dividends. It prised out revelations about his approach to his craft, Read more ...