In 2018, she made her feature film debut with the Academy Award- and BAFTA-nominated historical drama Mary Queen of Scots, starring Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie.

[citation needed] Rourke was the first person in the history of her school to attend Cambridge University, where she studied English at New Hall, now Murray Edwards College.

[7] While preparing those productions, Rourke assisted Peter Gill on his own play, The York Realist (2001),[8] and John Osborne's Luther (2001) on the Olivier stage of the National Theatre.

[12] Her productions for Sheffield Theatres during this time were on the Lyceum, Crucible and Studio stages and included Much Ado About Nothing (2005) and Willis Hall's The Long and the Short and the Tall (2006).

[29] As artistic director, she was responsible for programming the work of, amongst other directors: Phyllida Lloyd, who directed her all-female Shakespeare Trilogy at the Donmar;[30] Kwame Kwei-Armah; Lyndsey Turner, whose celebrated revivals of Brian Friel's work have been a significant part of the Donmar's programme; Polly Findlay; Blanche McIntyre; John Crowley; Joe Wright and Robert Hastie.

Other notable productions at the Donmar include: Saint Joan (2017) with Gemma Arterton;[33] Berenice (2012) with Anne-Marie Duff;[34] Conor McPherson's The Weir (2013); which transferred to the West-End;[35] Nick Payne's new play Elegy, starring Zoë Wanamaker, Barbara Flynn and Nina Sosanya;[36] the innovative and campaigning Privacy (2014) by James Graham;[37] The Machine (2013) by Matt Charman;[38] the musical City of Angels (2014) by Cy Coleman, Larry Gelbart and David Zippel, which won an Olivier Award;[39] Les Liaisons Dangereuses (2015) with Janet McTeer, Elaine Cassidy and Dominic West at the Donmar and McTeer, Birgitte Hjort Sørensen and Liev Schreiber on Broadway;[40] and also the BAFTA-nominated play for theatre and television, The Vote (2015), which was broadcast live onto television on the night of the general election.

[41] The broadcast starred Judi Dench, Mark Gatiss, Catherine Tate and Nina Sosanya and garnered the highest annual viewing figures for the channel in that slot.

[43] A number of Rourke's productions, including Coriolanus, Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Saint Joan, were broadcast in cinemas in the UK and internationally as part of the National Theatre Live programme.

[51] It largely took place in 1940s London, but those scenes were reportedly scaled back and new footage, greatly expanding the modern-day road trip sections, was filmed without Rourke at a low cost, with animation sequences used to fill any gaps.

[54][55] During the 2020 lockdown, she directed the episode "Her Big Chance" of the BBC reboot of Alan Bennett's classic 1980s monologues, Talking Heads, starring Jodie Comer in the lead role.

It featured the song "The Rhythm of Life" from the 1966 classic musical, Sweet Charity, and starred Jim Broadbent, Derek Jacobi, David Walliams, Asa Butterfield, Colin Salmon, Don Warrington, Nicola Roberts, Russel Tovey and West End dancers.