Who is Stephen Dillane?

Stephen John Dillane (born 27 March 1957) is a British actor. He is best known for his roles as Leonard Woolf in the 2002 film "The Hours", Stannis Baratheon in "Game of Thrones", and Thomas Jefferson in the 2008 HBO miniseries "John Adams", a part which earned him a Primetime Emmy nomination. An experienced stage actor who has been called an "actor's actor", Dillane won a Tony Award for his lead performance in Tom Stoppard's play "The Real Thing" (2000) and gave critically acclaimed performances in "Angels in America" (1993), "Hamlet" (1990), and a one-man "Macbeth" (2005). His television work has additionally garnered him BAFTA and International Emmy Awards for best actor.

He studied history and politics at the University of Exeter, concentrating on the Russian Revolution, and afterward became a journalist for the Croydon Advertiser. Unhappy in his career, he read one day how actor Trevor Eve gave up architecture for acting; this, along with reading Hamlet and Peter Brook's The Empty Space back-to-back, made him "light up inside somewhere" and spurred him to enter the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School at 25. During his early acting career, he was known as Stephen Dillon but reverted to his birth name in the 1990s.

Dillane has two sons with actress-director Naomi Wirthner: Séamus and actor Frank Dillane, who is best known for playing the young Tom Riddle in the film adaptation of "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" and Nick Clark on AMC's "Fear The Walking Dead".