English director and filmmaker Michael Grandage was BOTD in 1962. Born in Yorkshire, he was raised in Cornwall. He trained as an actor at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, then worked as a company actor for 12 years at the Royal Exchange in Manchester and the Royal Shakespeare Company. He made his directorial debut in 1996 at the Mercury Theatre in Colchester. In 2000, he was appointed artistic director of the Sheffield Theatre, working with new and emerging stars including Joseph Fiennes, Kenneth Branagh, Diana Rigg and Derek Jacobi. In 2002, he succeeded Sam Mendes as artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse in London. Over a decade, he produced 66 productions, directing 25 of them himself, including a critically praised production of Shakespeare‘s Othello starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Ewan McGregor, and Mark Ravenhill‘s The Cut with Ian McKellen. His productions of Frost/Nixon and Red received Broadway transfers, the latter winning Tony Awards for Grandage and Redmayne. Before leaving the Donmar, he established the Michael Grandage Company, attracting Hollywood celebrities including Daniel Radcliffe, Nicole Kidman and Forest Whitaker to appear on the London stage. His direction of Benjamin Britten‘s Billy Budd and Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro for Glyndebourne Opera were also well-received. In 2022, he directed the film My Policeman, an adaptation of Bethan Roberts’ novel about a bisexual policeman in 1950s England, starring Harry Styles, Rupert Everett and Emma Corrin. He and Corrin reunited for a 2023 stage adaptation of Virginia Woolf‘s novel Orlando. Grandage is in a long-term relationship with theatre designer Christopher Oram, with whom he frequently collaborates on stage productions, entering into a civil partnership in 2010.