Stephen Dillane | Rotten Tomatoes (2024)

Stephen Dillane was a British stage and screen actor who was best known for his critically-acclaimed roles in "The Hours" (2002), "John Adams" (HBO, 2008), and "Game of Thrones" (HBO, 2011-19). Born in Kensington and raised in Kent, Dillane's interest in acting began when he was a young boy. He had a knack for doing humorous accents and would often crack up his classmates while appearing in various school plays. When it came time to enter university, however, Dillane decided to put his acting aspirations on hold and study history and politics at the University of Exeter. He became a journalist after graduation, writing for the Croydon Advertiser, but quickly found himself unhappy and bored. So one day at the age of 25, Dillane decided to join the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School and pursue an acting career in earnest. He immediately fell in love and before long was appearing quite regularly on both the stage and screen. In the late 80s Dillane appeared in the British miniseries "The One Game" (ITV, 1988) and "Christabel" (BBC, 1988), and also played the role of Horatio in the Oscar-nominated feature film version of Shakespeare's iconic play "Hamlet" (1990). Dillane continued working steadily in both film and television throughout the 90s, and also found the time to appear in some of the most celebrated plays of the decade, including Tony Kushner's "Angels in America" (1993) and Tom Stoppard's "The Real Thing" (2000), the latter of which earned him an acting Tony in 2000. After the turn of the century, Dillane's screen acting career really began to soar. In addition to receiving universal acclaim for his performance as Leonard Woolf in the Oscar-winning drama "The Hours" (2002), he also received praise for his roles as Thomas Jefferson on the HBO historical drama "John Adams" and Stannis Baratheon on the enormously popular fantasy epic series "Game of Thrones." Beginning in 2013 Dillane also starred in the French-British crime drama series "The Tunnel" (Sky Atlantic/Canal+, 2013- ). The third season of "The Tunnel" premiered in July of 2018, which Dillane reprising his role as Detective Chief Inspector Karl Roebuck.