Wolf Hall star Mark Rylance: 'I said no to Steven Spielberg' 

Mark Rylance as Henry VIII’s ‘fixer’ Thomas Cromwell in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall serial on BBC2

The actor was offered two roles in Spielberg’s Bafta-winning 1987 film Empire Of The Sun but instead opted for a part in The ­Wandering Jew at the National.

“It was because of that decision I met my wife Claire,” Rylance tells Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs today.

The former artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe has won three Tony and two Olivier awards for his critically acclaimed stage work.

But he is now a ­familiar face to TV audiences thanks to his gripping portrayal of ­Thomas Cromwell in the BBC ­adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s novel about Henry VIII’s court.

Yet despite his achievements he started as a “painfully shy” boy who did not even speak till he was six.

Rylance, 55, told presenter Kirsty Young that while this “might have really worried a parent” it “actually ­propelled me into something that I’ve been lucky enough to have the attributes to be successful at”.

He wondered “whether some part of me had some intimation that I might one day get out in front of 2,500 people at the Palace Theatre and say, ‘To be or not to be’ and keep my nerve with such famous words… perhaps my young soul knew that and was terrified and was doing everything to avoid that fate.”

Born in Ashford, Kent, but raised in America where his father taught ­English, Rylance’s first notable role was in a 1976 production of Hamlet, when he was only 16.

He also appeared in the musical The Me That Nobody Knows but his parents were far from impressed. He said: “Very later on my father admitted they thought I was terrible and they didn’t know what to say,” Nevertheless, working on that production felt like being part of a “community”. He said: “It was a turning point and I never looked back.”

Rylance said that faced with the choice of a role in Spielberg’s film or starring at the National, he turned for help to the I Ching, the ancient Chinese divination manual.

“You just ask it, ‘Where now?’ and it gives an answer and the answer it gave if I went to the theatre was ‘community’ and that swayed it for me. I had never experienced com­munity on film sets because the ­community is among the technicians, actors come and go.

“But in the theatre you go through the deaths and the births and the happy and low moments of the group. And that decided it for me.”

Rylance met his musical director wife Claire van Kampen on set. She was already married with two young children, though her first husband Chris is now one of Rylance’s closest chums. He said: “Now we’re a five-person family in that Chris is ­probably one of my best friends and has been very, very forgiving and we go on long walks together and he is just a ­fantastic, fantastic man.”

Rylance’s younger stepdaughter Nataasha, a film director, died suddenly in 2012 at the age of 28 after suffering a brain haemorrhage.

He picked music his wife composed for the last film Nataasha was involved in, Days And Nights, as one of his castaway tracks.

He also picked the second movement of Beethoven’s Quartet number 16 in F sharp and Nina Simone’s version of Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues by Bob Dylan.

He chose Rumi: The Big Red Book by Coleman Barks as his book and the ­double bass Claire gave him when he left The Globe as his luxury.Desert Island Discs is on Radio 4 today at 11.15am

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