Britons dominated the 2008 Tony Award nominations for best actors in a play yesterday.

Patrick Stewart, Ben Daniels, Mark Rylance and Rufus Sewell were nominated for best actor in a play while Eve Best and Kate Fleetwood were nominated for best actress in the awards which celebrate excellence in Broadway theatre.

In the Heights, a barrio musical that brought a fresh beat to the Great White Way picked up 13 nominations.

Mr Stewart, who plays the title character in Macbeth, imported from the Chichester Festival, said: "There's never been an actor who has had greater, brilliant support than I do from our other 17 actors."

Mr Stewart, alongside Mr Daniels, who plays a scheming nobleman in Les Liaisons Dangereuses; Mr Rylance, who plays a mild-mannered visitor to Paris in Boeing-Boeing; and Mr Sewell, an accidental Czech dissident in Rock n' Roll, face competition from American actor Laurence Fishburne, who plays US Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall in the one-man show Thurgood.

Ms Fleetwood, the sexually provocative wife in The Homecoming, will face S Epatha Merkerson, of US TV's Law & Order, in the best actress in a play category for her portrayal of a housewife in a revival of William Inge's Come Back, Little Sheba.

A special lifetime achievement Tony will go to Stephen Sondheim, with a Tony awarded posthumously to orchestrator Robert Russell Bennett, who died in 1981.

Winners will be announced from Radio City Music Hall, New York on June 15.