Stephen Dillane

Stephen Dillane is a British stage and screen actor born on 27 March 1957 in Kensington, London. The eldest child of an English mother, Bridget (née Curwen), and an Irish-Australian surgeon father, John Dillane, he grew up in West Wickham, Kent. His younger brother Richard is also an actor. Dillane studied history and politics at the University of Exeter, with a focus on the Russian Revolution, and subsequently worked as a journalist for the Croydon Advertiser. His path toward acting shifted after reading about actor Trevor Eve's career change from architecture, an experience compounded by reading Hamlet and Peter Brook's The Empty Space in succession. He enrolled at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School at the age of 25. During his early professional years he performed under the name Stephen Dillon, reverting to his birth name in the 1990s.

Dillane built an extensive career in theatre before achieving wider recognition on screen. His notable stage roles include Archer in The Beaux' Stratagem at the Royal National Theatre in 1989, Prior Walter in Angels in America in 1993, Hamlet in 1994, Clov in Samuel Beckett's Endgame in 1996, and Uncle Vanya in 1998. He also appeared in The Coast of Utopia in 2002, performed a one-man version of Macbeth directed by Travis Preston in 2005, and took part in the 2010 Bridge Project productions of The Tempest and As You Like It. He has additionally performed T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets in both London and New York City, including a reprise of that reading in London in 2015, and made a one-off appearance in Tim Crouch's An Oak Tree at the National Theatre that same year. In 2016 he returned to the Donmar Warehouse to play Frank, an itinerant Irish healer, in a revival of Brian Friel's Faith Healer.

Dillane's Broadway appearance came in 2000, when he played Henry in Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing. The production earned him the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play, the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actor in a Play, and a Theatre World Award, all in 2000.

His film work includes the role of Horatio in the 1990 film adaptation of Hamlet and Michael Henderson in Welcome to Sarajevo in 1997, a character based on British journalist Michael Nicholson. He played the easily agitated Harker in Spy Game in 2001 and portrayed Leonard Woolf in The Hours in 2002. Additional film credits include English professional golfer Harry Vardon in The Greatest Game Ever Played in 2005, Glen Foy in the Goal! trilogy, and roles in Zero Dark Thirty and Twenty8k, both in 2012. That same year he starred in the British independent film Papadopoulos & Sons as entrepreneur Harry Papadopoulos, a role in which his son Frank Dillane played his on-screen son. In 2017 he appeared in two biopics, portraying Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax in Joe Wright's Darkest Hour and writer William Godwin in Mary Shelley. He also appeared in The Man in the Hat opposite Ciarán Hinds, directed by Stephen Warbeck.

On television, Dillane portrayed Thomas Jefferson in the HBO miniseries John Adams in 2008, a performance that earned him a Primetime Emmy nomination. He joined the cast of the HBO fantasy series Game of Thrones in 2011, playing Stannis Baratheon, a major contender for the throne of the fictional realm of Westeros, a role he held through 2015. In 2012 he played Rupert Keel, head of the private security agency Byzantium, in the BBC drama series Hunted. The following year he took the male lead in The Tunnel, an Anglo-French remake of the Scandinavian series The Bridge, playing Karl Roebuck opposite Clémence Poésy. His performance in that series won him an International Emmy Award for Best Actor. He reprised the role in the 2016 second series, The Tunnel: Sabotage. Also in 2016, he appeared as artist Graham Sutherland in the Netflix series The Crown.

In 2014, Dillane collaborated with visual artist Tacita Dean on a project called Event for a Stage, presented at the Sydney Biennale and Carriageworks. The live performance, later adapted for radio broadcast and film, explored filmmaking and the concept of artifice on the stage through a single actor, incorporating readings from texts alongside his personal reflections on acting, theatre, and family. Dillane has two sons, Séamus and Frank Dillane, with actress and director Naomi Wirthner. His television work has also earned him BAFTA and International Emmy Awards for best actor.