Oscar-winner Rylance faces a new tragedy
GARLANDED with honours — an Oscar and a Bafta among them — Sir Mark Rylance is surely the most compelling actor of his generation, whether on stage or screen. But he is also afflicted by appalling personal tragedies.
A decade after the sudden death of one of his two step-daughters, aged just 28, he has now suffered the loss of his younger brother, Jonathan, 60, in dreadful circumstances, in California, where ‘Jonno’, as he was known, had lived for many years.
Surnamed Waters — the name which Sir Mark shed when embarking on his acting career — Jonno was cycling in the city of Oakland late one evening last week when he was hit by an oncoming vehicle, suffering severe head injuries.
Members of the local fire department, who were first on the scene, gave immediate treatment but, despite being rushed to hospital, Jonno died the following morning, leaving friends in a state of shock.
Many of them knew him from the more than three decades he spent at one of California’s most acclaimed restaurants, Chez Panisse, where he had initially cleared tables before becoming an inspired sommelier, adored not only for his encyclopaedic knowledge of wines but also for what one friend described as ‘his grace and joy, light and wit and spirit’.
Rylance, 62, had been starring in the West End revival of Jerusalem, in what one critic has called an ‘almost superhuman’ performance.
This week, theatre-goers have been told of Jonno’s death and Rylance’s consequent absence.
On Sunday, he will be in California at a service commemorating the life of the brother with whom he and their sister, Susannah, grew up in America, largely in Wisconsin, where their father taught at the University School of Milwaukee.
The abrupt curtailment of Jonno’s life is as brutally sudden and unexpected as was the fatal brain haemorrhage suffered by Rylance’s step-daughter Nataasha van Kampen, a gifted filmmaker, while on a flight from New York to London in 2012.