The Vicar of Dibley's choirmaster also runs one of Britain's boldest theatre companies
Film audiences know Simon McBurney as a spymaster in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy or the voice of the house-elf Kreacher. On stage he is the founder of Complicité, a company whose shows have turned a mathematical friendship and a photographer lost in the Amazon into acclaimed theatre.
McBurney was born in Cambridge in 1957. His father, Charles McBurney, was an American archaeologist, and his great-grandfather was the surgeon who gave his name to McBurney's point, a landmark doctors use when checking for appendicitis. His parents were distant cousins who met during the Second World War, and his older brother Gerard is a composer. After reading English at Peterhouse, Cambridge, and graduating in 1980, he went to Paris to train in physical theatre at the Jacques Lecoq school and with Philippe Gaulier.
With Complicité he developed a style built on devised, ensemble work, winning the Europe Prize Theatrical Realities in 1997. Two productions drew on stories by the writer John Berger, and Mnemonic took the Critics' Circle award for best new play in 1999. A Disappearing Number, which he conceived and directed, explored the partnership between the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan and the Cambridge don G. H. Hardy, and won the same award in 2007. The Encounter, about the photographer Loren McIntyre getting lost in Brazil's Javari Valley, premiered in Edinburgh in 2015 and was later named by Guardian writers the 13th best theatre show since 2000.
He also works widely outside the company. He directed Brecht and Arthur Miller in New York, staged comedy tours for Lenny Henry and French and Saunders, and directed Mozart's The Magic Flute for English National Opera in 2013 and at the Metropolitan Opera in 2023. He won an Olivier Award for choreography for a National Theatre production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle.
On screen he played Cecil the choirmaster in The Vicar of Dibley, an archdeacon in the comedy Rev., the head of MI6 in Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation and a British diplomat in The Last King of Scotland. He also wrote the story for Mr. Bean's Holiday. He was made an OBE in 2005 and also champions Survival International, which campaigns for the rights of tribal peoples.
Source: Simon McBurney
