Sir Mark Rylance has found “inspiration” in nature.

The 62-year-old actor – who was born in Kent, England, but raised largely in Wisconsin in the US – has revealed that he finds it “healing” to surround himself with nature.

He said: “I’ve always been drawn to forests near towns. The wild bit of land near the organised bit.

“I grew up in an American suburb in the 1970s surrounded by Coca-Cola executives who’d come back every weekend with a dead deer on their car. There were forests with abandoned fox farms in them and that’s where I spent every afternoon, every weekend. I found inspiration and succour in nature. It was a healing place for me.”

Mark’s brother, Jonathan, died in a collision with a car earlier this year, and the actor recently retraced a journey he used to go on with his sibling.

Mark – who previously starred as Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron in the acclaimed play ‘Jerusalem’ – told the Guardian newspaper: “I’ve just been walking in the mountains, in the Sierra Nevada, for five days with backpacks and stuff.

“I’ve done it for 20 years with my brother, and he died in May so seven of us went up to walk the forests recently. That sense of getting lost, and being in a place where there are bears and snakes – it’s the opposite of the new estate life you see in ‘Jerusalem’, that ordered, efficient agenda which is so soul-destroying.”

Mark also revealed that he worries about the impact of environmental change.

He said: “What we’ve done to the Earth over the last 200 years is coming back at us now.

“Some people say the anxiety many of us feel is literally rising out of the Earth. It’s as though the Earth itself is anxious.”