The director and composer Claire van Kampen, the spouse of the actor Mark Rylance, has died on the age of 71 after being identified with most cancers.
She died within the central German city of Kassel surrounded by her household on Saturday morning, a press release shared on behalf of Rylance and her daughter Juliet mentioned. Saturday additionally marked Rylance’s sixty fifth birthday.
Van Kampen was a live performance pianist, playwright, theatre director and labored in varied roles at Shakespeare’s Globe for round 20 years.
Her household described her as “one of many funniest and [most] inspiring ladies we have now ever recognized”.
They added: “We thank her for imbuing our lives together with her magic, music, laughter, and love.
“Ring the bell, sound the trumpets reverie, one thing is completed, one thing is starting. One of many nice clever ones has handed.”
Van Kampen skilled on the Royal Faculty of Music in London the place she studied music concept and piano, specialising within the efficiency of twentieth century music.
She went on to have a profession as a composer and performer, writing and enjoying for theatre, radio, tv and movie soundtracks and the live performance corridor.
In 1986, Van Kampen started her theatre profession with the Royal Shakespeare Firm and with the Royal Nationwide Theatre the next 12 months.
She served as inventive affiliate at Shakespeare’s Globe from 1996 to 2006 when Rylance was the inventive director.
Van Kampen later acted as a musical guide and resident composer to the next inventive director Dominic Dromgoole from 2007 to 2015.
She was additionally a inventive affiliate of the Outdated Vic theatre in London.
Van Kampen’s theatre credit embody composing the music for the 1989 Royal Shakespeare Firm manufacturing of Hamlet starring Rylance, whom she married that very same 12 months.
Later in her profession she created unique scores for Broadway productions of 2000’s True West, 2008’s Boeing-Boeing and 2010 comedy La Bete, in addition to diversifications of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night time and Richard III.
Van Kampen additionally wrote the play Farinelli and the King, which noticed Rylance star as King Philippe V of Spain and was nominated for a number of Olivier awards together with greatest new play, and a variety of Tony awards.
Rylance was requested about his inventive relationship along with his spouse in an article for the Guardian in 2023. He mentioned: “Claire utterly modified my life. We met on the Nationwide Theatre when she was musical director of a play I used to be in.
“She launched me to that world of classical and fashionable music, and it was very a lot round music that we fell in love.
“We’ve at all times liked working collectively, from Phoebus Cart, our personal theatre firm within the 90s, to our years on the Globe, to Farinelli and the King.
“From the start, we have been at all times imagining tales that we might inform collectively. I’ve misplaced rely of what number of initiatives we’ve imagined, sitting there at our kitchen desk.”
Van Kampen was beforehand married to architect Christopher van Kampen, with whom she had two daughters Juliet and Nataasha.
Her youngest daughter Nataasha, a filmmaker, died aged 28 in 2012 after struggling a mind haemorrhage.
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