Claire van Kampen, the composer and playwright who was married to Oscar-winner Mark Rylance, is dead. She was 71 years old and sadly passed on Rylance’s 65th birthday. According to PEOPLE, Rylance and van Kampen’s daughter confirmed the passing and its sad timing. She had been diagnosed with cancer before her passing.
“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,” the statement read. “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.”
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The statement continued, noting van Kampen was “one of the funniest and inspiring women we have ever known” and praising her for “imbuing our lives with her magic, music, laughter and love.”
“Ring the bell, sound the trumpets reverie, something is done, something is beginning. One of the great wise ones has passed,” the statement concluded.
Rylance and the composer married in 1989 after she composed the music for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Hamlet, starring the Oscar winner. She joined the company three years prior, coming from the Royal College of Music in London where she trained on piano and studied music theory. She joined the Royal National Theatre the next year and would go on to compose for several productions in London and on Broadway.
Van Kampen and Rylance were partners in numerous ways and it shows. She has worked alongside him several times, even working as a music advisor and arranger for Wolf Hall, the BBC production with Rylance as Thomas Cromwell based on the novels of the same name. According to BBC News, she was also recently the “Globe associate and senior research fellow for early modern music” and a creative associate at the Old Vic Theatre in London.
She was preceded in death by her daughter Nataasha, who passed in 2012 after a brain hemorrhage at 28. She had two daughters with her previous husband, Christopher van Kampen.
