Feature: We Saw Them First/The Actors - Five Plays Whose Male Players Later Became Stars

There's little more satisfying than saying you clocked a particular actor way back when. Playgoers whose experience extends back far enough can point to any number of Royal Shakespeare Company productions that gave the likes of Ian McKellen and Judi Dench prominence well before the public at large knew who they were. Oh, for example, to have been in the room live to see that pair's vaunted Macbeth in 1976, which has at least been preserved on film.

Many British screen stars may seem to have come to public attention as comparative unknowns, but not to theatre devotees. What follows is a list of five actors whom I managed to catch early in their stage careers before wider fame came to call; we will revisit the same topic next week, focusing instead on the actresses.

Daniel Day-Lewis, Futurists, National Theatre (1986)

Daniel Day-Lewis was appearing as the Russian poet Mayakovsky in Dusty Hughes's play at the National when the chameleonic actor happened to open on American screens on the very same day in his two breakout films, A Room With A View and My Beautiful Laundrette, playing roles that could not be more different: the snobbish Cecil Vyse in the first, a gay South London skinhead in the second. Day-Lewis went on to portray Hamlet at the National, a production he departed during the run, since which time he has won three Oscars, most recently for Lincoln (see below) - and not done another play.

Jude Law, Les Parents Terribles, National Theatre (1994)

The preternaturally charismatic Law was all of 22 when he appeared in the director Sean Mathias's scorching reclamation of Jean Cocteau's fever dream of a play, baring no shortage of flesh in the process and garnering a Tony nomination (his first of two) when he travelled with the show the next year to Broadway: by that point, the same play was known by the awkward new title Indiscretions. From there, it seemed an inevitable leap to The Talented Mr. Ripley (see below) and Law's ongoing screen renown, though here's one movie star (Ralph Fiennes is another) who returns to the theatre with welcome regularity: his Mat Burke in the Donmar's 2011 Anna Christie fully deserves a Broadway airing.

Daniel Craig, A Number, Royal Court Theatre (2002)

Craig hadn't yet been cast as James Bond when the brilliant Stephen Daldry chose a then regular of the London stage to join the mighty Michael Gambon in Caryl Churchill's stunning two-hander about genetic cloning and self-reckoning. In fact, Churchill's 70-minute one-act required Craig to play three roles, which the actor differentiated with ease without a single change of costume. Craig returned to the play in 2019, this time inheriting Gambon's role as the perturbed father, Salter, in a one-night benefit performance of the play in New York. By then, Craig's name was world-renowned thanks to a franchise to be continued this year with No Time To Die (see trailer below).

Eddie Redmayne, The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? Almeida Theatre (2004)

I had seen Edward Albee's thrilling late-career Tony-winner on Broadway and admired Jeffrey Carlson's performance as the gay teenage son of Bill Pullman and Mercedes Ruehl. But nothing in New York prepared me for the blistering intensity brought to the same role in its subsequent London premiere by a little-known actor by the name of Eddie Redmayne who now has a Tony (for the play Red, see below) and an Oscar (for playing the late and legendary Stephen Hawking) to his name. As the highly emotive son of Jonathan Pryce and Kate Fahy, Redmayne ramped up the stakes of a searing play that begins as a caustic comedy and ends by plumbing the very nature of tragedy itself.

Daniel Kaluuya, Sucker Punch, Royal Court Theatre (2010)

Kaluuya won Critics Circle and Evening Standard Awards for his breakout performance as a boxer in Roy Williams's blistering play, which helped propel the actor towards the Oscar-nominated glory of Get Out (see trailer below): he is an awards-season hopeful again this year for Judas and the Black Messiah. Much is made in film of actors having to be match fit for their parts but it's difficult to imagine anyone toned more gruellingly and fully for a role than Kaluuya was for the part of Leon, a title-winner who faces a gloved showdown that one can mention in the same breath as Robert De Niro in Raging Bull - except that Kaluuya's transformation happened live.

Who do you remember seeing way back when, well before the rest of the world knew who he was? Let us know @BroadwayWorldUK

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