First published: 21 Mar 2010

Rachel Weisz and Mark Rylance have been named Best Actress and Actor in the 2010 Laurence Olivier Awards, while Wicked was voted most popular show by the readers of Official London Theatre.

Weisz returned to the stage last summer to star as Blanche DuBois in the Donmar Warehouse revival of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. The British actress, better known for her screen work including The Mummy Returns and About A Boy, adds a Best Actress Laurence Olivier Award to her growing collection, having already won Critics’ Circle and Evening Standard awards for her performance at the Donmar.

Rylance also makes it a hat-trick in this awards season by winning the Best Actor Laurence Olivier Award for his portrayal of local waster Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron in Jerusalem. Jez Butterworth’s play opened at the Royal Court last summer and transferred earlier this year to the Apollo theatre, where it plays to 24 April. This is Rylance’s second Laurence Olivier Award; he won Best Actor in 1994 for Much Ado About Nothing. He was most recently nominated in 2008 for his role in Boeing Boeing, losing out to Chiwetel Ejiofor.

The final presentation before the dinner break went to the musical Wicked, which won the brand new Audience Award for most popular long-running show, voted for by readers of Official London Theatre. More than 58,000 votes were cast during the two-stage voting process, with Wicked triumphing over fellow nominees Billy Elliot The Musical, War Horse, We Will Rock You and The Phantom Of The Opera.

Wicked, which has been playing at the Apollo Victoria since 2006, is based on Gregory Maguire’s novel and tells the story of two very different girls who meet at college and go on to become Glinda the Good and the Wicked Witch of the West, characters from L Frank Baum’s novel The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz.

This is the show’s first Laurence Olivier Award, having failed to convert its four nominations in 2007.

CB