Richard Eyre CBE – Year of election 2011

Richard Eyre, Artistic Director of the Royal National Theatre, 1988–97, is a director of film, theatre, television and opera, and has won innumerable prizes for his work, including five Olivier Awards, and, in 1997, an Olivier Lifetime Achievement Award. His memoir, National Service: diary of a decade at the National Theatre (2003), received the 2003 Theatre Book Prize. He was appointed CBE in 1992 and knighted in 1997.