Sam Wanamaker

Founder. The American actor Sam Wanamaker set up the Shakespeare Globe Trust in 1970 and spent more than two decades raising money and fighting planning battles to rebuild Shakespeare's open-air theatre on Bankside, near its original site. He died in 1993, four years before Shakespeare's Globe opened. The indoor candlelit Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, added in 2014, carries his name, and the Globe is now one of London's busiest theatres.