Spacey honoured with Shakespeare award

Published Tuesday 28 March 2006 at 17:05 by Judd Hollander

Kevin Spacey has been selected to receive the 19th Annual William Shakespeare Award for Classical Theatre, also known as the Will Award.

Presented by the Shakespeare Theatre Company from Washington, DC, the award honours a person who has made a significant contribution to classical theatre in America. Spacey, who has won Academy, Tony, Evening Standard and Olivier awards during his career, will receive the Will Award during a gala benefit evening on May 13.

Spacey’s breakthrough stage role came in the 1986 Broadway production of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night - a part he recreated at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket in London. He won the Tony Award in 1991 for Best Supporting Actor in Neil Simon’s Lost in Yonkers and the Evening Standard and Olivier Awards for his role as Hickey in O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, which began at London’s Almeida Theatre and later transferred to the Old Vic before moving on to Broadway in 1999. His films include LA Confidential, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, The Usual Suspects and American Beauty.

Now serving as the artistic director of the Old Vic, Spacey recently played the title role in Richard II, for which he received a Critics’ Circle award.

Past recipients of the Will Award include Jeremy Irons, Judi Dench, Fiona Shaw, Ralph Fiennes, Anthony Hopkins, Maggie Smith, Hal Holbrook, Patrick Stewart, Sam Waterston, Lynn Redgrave, Christopher Walken, Morgan Freeman, Mel Gibson, Kenneth Branagh, Christopher Plummer, Kevin Kline, the late Joseph Papp and Shakespeare Theatre Company artistic director Michael Kahn.