Stephen Daldry

Stephen Daldry (born May 2, 1961, Dorset, England) is an English film and theatre director known for his sensitive and nuanced treatments of stories featuring conflicted characters.

Daldry’s father—a bank manager who died when Daldry was 15—discouraged his early interest in theatre. Abetted by his cabaret singer mother, however, Daldry joined a theatre troupe in Taunton and by age 15 had resolved to direct. He attended the University of Sheffield on a Royal Air Force scholarship, earning a bachelor’s degree (1982) in English literature. At Sheffield he directed the university theatre company and cultivated his radical bona fides with forays into socialism and a penchant for wearing pillbox hats.

Daldry then further flouted convention as an apprentice clown in Italy. Upon returning to England, he settled in Sheffield, where he became the artistic director of the Metro Theatre Company (1984–86) and apprenticed at the Crucible Theatre (1986–88). While presiding over London’s Gate Theatre (1989–92), he championed obscure works by international writers, an ethos equally apparent during his subsequent tenure as artistic director of the Royal Court Theatre (1992–98). Daldry’s direction of J.B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls for the National Theatre in 1992 earned him a Laurence Olivier Award and, when the production traveled to Broadway (1994), a Tony Award. He returned to Broadway in 1999 as the director of British playwright David Hare’s one-man show Via Dolorosa.

Daldry—at the time credited with one short film—was then unexpectedly tapped to direct Billy Elliot. The film—about a boy who finds refuge in ballet—was nominated for several Academy Awards, including best director. Daldry then helmed The Hours (2002), Hare’s adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. A series of three meditations on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, the film starred Julianne Moore, Meryl Streep, and—as Woolf—Nicole Kidman. Daldry again received an Oscar nomination for best director, and Kidman claimed best actress honours.

In 2005 Daldry premiered Billy Elliot, the Musical, a stage adaptation of his earlier film, in London. The production, which featured music by Elton John, won four Olivier Awards. The Broadway production (2008) garnered 10 Tony Awards, including best musical and best director honours for Daldry. He returned to the big screen with The Reader (2008), which was adapted by Hare from German author Bernhard Schlink’s novel. The film peers at the spectre of the Holocaust in post-World War II Germany through the lens of an affair between an illiterate woman (played by Kate Winslet) and a teenage boy who, as an adult, agonizes over the revelation that his lover was previously a concentration camp guard. The film earned Academy Award nominations for best picture and for Daldry’s direction as well as an Oscar for Winslet. In his next film, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2011), based on a novel by American writer Jonathan Safran Foer, a precocious nine-year-old boy wanders around New York City in search of the lock to a key left behind by his father, who died in the September 11 attacks.

In 2013 Daldry directed Helen Mirren in Peter Morgan’s play The Audience, which imagined the private weekly conversations between Queen Elizabeth II and the succession of British prime ministers over six decades. He then oversaw a 2014 revival of David Hare’s Skylight. The critically acclaimed production, which starred Carey Mulligan and Bill Nighy as former lovers, earned Daldry a Tony nomination for best director. Daldry returned to cinema with Trash (2014), a drama about three boys who stumble upon a political scandal while picking through refuse in the favela they call home. He then reteamed with Morgan on The Crown (2016– ), a Netflix TV series about the life of Elizabeth II; Daldry served as executive producer and directed several episodes. In 2018 he won an Emmy Award for his direction.

In 2017 Daldry codirected The Jungle, a stage play set in the migrant encampment in Calais, France, just before it was razed in 2016. Written by two Englishmen who traveled to the camp and set up a theatre, the play not only explored the predicament of the refugees but also the guilt and helplessness of the camp’s volunteers. Daldry then directed The Inheritance, which premiered in London in 2018. Inspired by E.M. Forster’s classic novel Howards End (1910), the play considers the lives of young gay men a generation after the height of the AIDS crisis. It won four Olivier Awards, and Daldry was named best director. The production opened on Broadway in 2019, and it went on to receive a number of Tony Awards. Notably, The Inheritance was named best play, and Daldry won for his direction. In 2021 he returned to the big screen with Together, which centres on a couple examining their relationship while under lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Daldry was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2004.