Mark Rylance Mourns Wife Claire van Kampen After She Dies on His Birthday

Claire van Kampen, a composer and playwright who was married to Wolf Hall actor Mark Rylance, has died. She was 71 years old.

Van Kampen died on Saturday, January 18, which was Rylance’s 65th birthday, People reports.

“Claire Louise van Kampen, Lady Rylance, has died this morning, Saturday the 18th of January at 11:47, in the ancient town of Kassel, Germany, surrounded by her family,” her family said in a statement, per the magazine.

“Claire has died of cancer on Mark Rylance’s 65th birthday. Her youngest daughter having died in 2012, she leaves her eldest daughter, Juliet Rylance, her two husbands, and countless beloved friends in England and America.”

Van Kampen was “one of the finniest and [most] inspiring women we have ever known,” her family added. “We thank her for imbuing our lives with her magic, music, laughter, and love.”

After studying music theory and piano at the Royal College of Music in London, van Kampen joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1986, BBC News reports. She composed the music for a 1989 production of Hamlet, starring Rylance, whom she married that year.

“Claire completely changed my life,” Rylance said in a 2023 interview with The Guardian. “She introduced me to that world of classical and modern music, and it was very much around music that we fell in love. We’ve always loved working together. … From the beginning, we were always imagining stories that we could tell together. I’ve lost count of how many projects we’ve imagined, sitting there at our kitchen table. Claire came to me with two children whom I raised with her and [her first husband], but we never had children of our own, so, to some degree, our projects have been our children. They are an incredible, creative joy to us, and Claire is the rock of my life.”

Van Kampen also composed scores for the Broadway productions of True West, Boeing-Boeing, and La Bête, plus adaptations of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Richard III. She worked as an associate and senior research fellow for early modern music at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre and a creative associate at the Old Vic Theatre.

She wrote the play Farinelli and the King, the 2017 Broadway production of which starred Rylance. She also notched a collaboration with her husband when she worked as Wolf Hall’s Tudor music advisor and arranger.

With her previous husband, architect Christopher van Kampen, Claire welcomed two daughters, actor Juliet Rylance and filmmaker Nataasha van Kampen, the latter of whom died of a brain hemorrhage in 2012.