Fiona Shaw

Fiona Shaw, CBE (Hon) (born July 10, 1958) is a leading Irish actress and theatre director. Although to international audiences she is probably most familiar for her minor role as Petunia Dursley in the Harry Potter films, she is regarded as one of the finest classical actresses of her generation.^[1][2] Shaw was awarded an honorary CBE in 2001.^[3]

Early life

Shaw was born Fiona Mary Wilson in County Cork, Ireland, to a mixed-religious couple and was raised Catholic.^[4][5] Her father was an eye surgeon^[6] and her mother was a physicist.^[7] She liked to be called "Fe Fe" in her childhood years and attended secondary school at Scoil Mhuire In Cork City. She received her degree in University College Cork. She trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in London and was part of 'new wave’ of actors to emerge from the Academy. Others included Jonathan Pryce, Juliet Stevenson, Alan Rickman, Anton Lesser, Bruce Payne and Kenneth Branagh. She received much acclaim as Julia in the National Theatre production of Richard Sheridan's The Rivals (1983), a role which demonstrated her gift for comedy. Despite her natural comic abilities, Shaw has opted more often than not for roles showcasing her extreme but unaffected emotional intensity. These performances have earned her numerous stage awards.

Career

Her notable theatrical roles include Young Woman in Machinal, Celia in As You Like It (1984), Madame de Volanges in Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1985), Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew (1987), Winnie in Happy Days (2007), and the title roles in Electra (1988), The Good Person of Sechuan (1989), Hedda Gabler (1991), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1998) and Medea (2000). She performed T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land as a one-person show at the Liberty Theatre in New York to great acclaim in 1996, winning the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding One-Person Show for her performance.^[8]

Shaw played the lead in Richard II, directed by Deborah Warner in 1995. Shaw has collaborated with Warner on a number of occasions, on both stage and screen. Shaw has also worked in film and television, including My Left Foot, Jane Eyre, Persuasion, Gormenghast, and a number of the Harry Potter films in which she plays the insufferable Aunt Petunia. Shaw had a brief but key role in Brian DePalma's The Black Dahlia.

In 2008, she directed her first opera, Riders to the Sea by Vaughan Williams at the ENO.

In 2009, Shaw collaborated with Deborah Warner again, taking the lead role in Tony Kushner's translation of Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children. In a 2002 article for The Daily Telegraph Rupert Christiansen described their professional relationship as "surely one of the most richly creative partnerships in theatrical history."^[9] Other collaborations between the two women include productions of Brecht's The Good Woman of Szechuan and Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, the latter was adapted for television.

In March 2010 she will star in an NT revival of London Assurance.^[10]

Personal life

Shaw has been romantically linked in the press with actress Saffron Burrows.^[11][12][13] Neither actress has publicly confirmed or denied the relationship. The two appeared together in the National Theatre's production of The PowerBook,^[14] a play based on the novel of the same name by Jeanette Winterson in which they played lovers. In an interview with the New Statesman published on 24 September 2009, Shaw stated that she lives in Primrose Hill where she "has lived ... on and off for a long time".^[15]

Credits

• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1985) (TV series)
• My Left Foot (1989)
• Mountains of the Moon (1990)
• Three Men and a Little Lady (1990)
• Hedda Gabler (1993) (a televisation of the NT production)
• Super Mario Bros. (1993)
• Undercover Blues (1993)
• Persuasion (1995)
• Jane Eyre (1996)
• Anna Karenina (1997)
• The Butcher Boy (1997)
• The Avengers (1998)
• The Last September (1999)
• Gormenghast (2000) (TV)
• Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (2001)
• Medea (2001) (West End & NYC)
• The Seventh Stream (2001)
• Doctor Sleep (2002)
• The Triumph of Love (2002)
• Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002)
• The PowerBook (2002) (NT, which she co-devised)
• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)
• Midsummer Dream (2005)
• Empire (2005, international tour) (TV)
• The Black Dahlia (2006)
• Catch and Release (2007)
• Fracture (2007)
• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007)
• Happy Days (2007 & 2008, NT and internationally)
• Dorian Gray (2009)

Mother Courage and her Children (NT)

• The Tree of Life (2010)

Other projects, contributions

• When Love Speaks (2002, EMI Classics) - "It is thy will thy image should keep open"
• Simon Schama's John Donne- 2009

References

External links

• Fiona Shaw at the Internet Movie Database
• Fiona Shaw at the Internet Broadway Database
• World Theatre - Working in the Theatre Seminar video at American Theatre Wing.org, January 2002