Director, actor, and writer Simon McBurney is one of the most innovative and influential artists working in theatre today. He was the recipient of the Olivier, Evening Standard, and London Critics Circle Awards for Best Play for A Disappearing Number, which played at the Barbican Theatre in London.
The co-founder of the troupe Complicité (originally named Théâtre de Complicité), Mr. McBurney has written, directed and acted in more than forty productions for the company. New York audiences have seen his stagings and adaptations of The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol, at the 1996 Lincoln Center Festival; The Chairs, which received six 1998 Tony Award nominations; The Street of Crocodiles, at the 1998 Lincoln Center Festival; The Noise of Time, at Lincoln Center in collaboration with The Emerson String Quartet in 2000, and again in 2003; Mnemonic, which won three Lucille Lortel Awards including Unique Theatrical Experience of 2001; 2002's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, produced with Tony Randall's National Actors Theatre, starring Al Pacino; The Elephant Vanishes, at the 2004 Lincoln Center Festival; and the 2008-2009 Broadway revival of All My Sons, starring John Lithgow and Dianne Wiest.
He collaborated with Russian composer Alexander Raskatov on an opera adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov's novella A Dog's Heart, staged at the Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam and the ENO (English National Opera) in London's West End in 2010.
Mr. McBurney is the recipient of the 2008 Berlin Academy of Arts Konrad Wolf Prize for outstanding multi-disciplinary artists. Also in 2008, he became the first non-Japanese director to receive the Yomiuri Theatre Awards Grand Prize, for his staging of Shun-kin.
As an actor, he performs extensively in film and television. Films have included Nicole Holofcener's Friends with Money, opposite Frances McDormand; Brian Gilbert's Tom & Viv; Bill Forsyth's Being Human; Martha Fiennes' Onegin; Stephen Fry's Bright Young Things; Jonathan Demme's The Manchurian Candidate, with Denzel Washington; Kevin Macdonald's The Last King of Scotland, alongside Academy Award winner Forest Whitaker; Chris Weitz's The Golden Compass; Saul Dibb's The Duchess, opposite Keira Knightley; Ridley Scott's Body of Lies and Robin Hood; David Yates' Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1, as the voice of Kreacher; Woody Allen's Magic in the Moonlight; also for Focus Features, Cary Joji Fukunaga's Jane Eyre; and, also for Focus Features and Working Title Films, Tomas Alfredson's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. In television, he starred in The Borgias opposite Jeremy Irons; in Rev., opposite Tom Hollander; and in miniseries The Casual Vacancy, which is based on J.K. Rowling's novel.
Focus Features
