Daldry, Stephen

Daldry, Stephen (1960- ), English theatre director and manager, and a leading figure among a remarkable generation of young stage directors in Britain in the early 1990s. Born in Dorset, he graduated from Sheffield University in 1982 and moved to Italy where he trained in circus skills with Il Circo di Nando Orfei. He returned to Britain to work as a director in fringe theatre, working with Metro Theatre Company (1984-1986), as Arts Council Trainee Director (1984-1985), and at the Liverpool Playhouse, the Sheffield Crucible, and the Oxford Playhouse. From 1989-1992 he was artistic director of the Gate Theatre in Notting Hill, where he gained a reputation for rediscovering neglected European classics and presenting vibrant, illuminating productions on negligible budgets. His work at the Gate included a string of plays from the Spanish Golden Age, reintroducing the works of writers such as Lope de Vega to young audiences.

In 1992 Daldry and designer Ian MacNeil were acclaimed for their expressionist reinterpretation of the J. B. Priestley play An Inspector Calls at the Royal National Theatre, a production which won numerous awards and subsequently toured internationally before moving to the West End where it was a commercial as well as an artistic success. They followed this in 1993 with Machinal, again in their trade-mark expressionist style with a technically complex set and bold stagecraft. In 1994 Daldry succeeded Max Stafford-Clark as artistic director of the Royal Court Theatre, presenting a bold programme of work by new and young writers alongside revivals of contemporary Royal Court classics. In 1996 the theatre embarked on a £26 million rebuilding programme, which necessitated closure of the old Royal Court building, a situation to which Daldry responded with characteristic flair, leading the company into temporary homes in the West End, at the Duke of York’s and Ambassadors theatres.

He left the Royal Court in 1998 to concentrate on film projects, directing his first feature film, Billy Elliot (2000), about an 11-year-old boy from a northern mining town who has ambitions to be a ballet dancer, and The Hours (2002), a story linking the lives of two fictional women with that of Virginia Woolf as she writes her 1925 novel Mrs Dalloway, which was voted Best Dramatic Film at the 2003 Golden Globes. Daldry remains closely involved with theatre as a board-member of the Old Vic and Young Vic, and as an associate director of the Royal Court, where he directed Far Away by Caryl Churchill in 2000. A stage musical directed by Daldry based on the film Billy Elliot opened to unanimous acclaim in London’s West End in 2005. He was made a CBE in the 2004 New Year’s Honours.