Stephen Dillane

Early life[edit]

Dillane was born in Kensington, London, to an English mother, Bridget (née Curwen), and an Irish-Australian surgeon father, John Dillane, who was born in Australia to Irish parents.^[6][7][8] The eldest of his siblings (his younger brother Richard is also an actor), he grew up in West Wickham, Kent.^[9]


At school, Dillane began performing in end-of-term plays and had "a certain facility" for funny accents.^[9] He often found himself in women's roles, which he says "wasn’t good for my confused adolescent psyche",^[10] but also recalls a part in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead as being particularly memorable, noting that shouting "Fire!" as Rosencrantz while pointing at the audience was "a very thrilling thing to be able to do."^[11]


He studied history and politics at the University of Exeter, concentrating on the Russian Revolution,^[12] and afterward became a journalist for the Croydon Advertiser. Unhappy in his career, he read one day how actor Trevor Eve gave up architecture for acting; this, along with reading Hamlet and Peter Brook's The Empty Space back-to-back, made him "light up inside somewhere"^[13] and spurred him to enter the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School at 25.^[7][14] During his early acting career, he was known as Stephen Dillon but reverted to his birth name in the 1990s.^[13][15]