The NS Interview: Fiona Shaw: Where is home for you? Is it still Ireland?I live in Primrose Hill. I’ve lived there on and off for a long time. I couldn’t say that home was Ireland. I should say that; I should be there more often. My father is very old now, so I go home as often as possible. But I live alone in Primrose Hill, and I go to and fro wherever I need to be.Do you love to travel?I do love to be in more than one place. There’s a relationship with Los Angeles, but I also love to go anywhere else. I have a very untypical life.You’re starring in Mother Courage and Her Children. Do you see it as an anti-war play?It isn’t an anti-war play: it sort of says that war is the state of affairs, and there are moments of peace within war. That’s very challenging, I think, for an audience sitting in London. Five hundred yards from this theatre is the place that is declaring war. The play is entertainment, fundamentally, but I feel that it’s about war because war is a heightened way of being.People are always proclaiming the death or the rebirth of political theatre. What’s your view?I couldn’t say that phrase has been used once in our experience of this play. It’s got none of the earnestness associated with political theatre. It’s high classical, poetical theatre, thrilling with the roots of music hall and what we would now call populist theatre. The phrase “political theatre” has lost its meaning in the strictest sense, but I hope the audience has a wonderful time thinking about the issues.How are you finding this, after Happy Days?I wanted very much to do something, having done a Beckett sitting in a mound, with a lot of people. I was glad to get out of the mound.Recently you directed an opera, Riders to the Sea. Did you enjoy the departure from acting?I’ve spent an enormous amount of time in rehearsals in the past 20 years, and part-producing the work I’ve been part of, so directing is not a million miles to jump. With the opera, I was quite keen to do something outside my realm. It’s very good for any artist to throw themselves into the unknown. I’m going to do another opera, actually, in the spring.If you weren’t in the arts, what would you be?I would have been a philosophy teacher, probably no more than that. I read philosophy at university. All my family were doctors, but I probably wasn’t heading towards that.You’re credited with an intellectual approach. How do you see the role of the intellectual?You’ve got the wrong person. I’m not an intellectual; I’m loquacious. I love talking to intellectuals, but my participation is straw-sucking. Human experience is wide, and geographically very wide: you can go anywhere in the world. But some people really know the depth of it.Who are your greatest influences?I have worked with a lot of directors, and all of them have been fantastic because you learn different things. Peter Stein has been a big influence on me – I learned from him about doing a thing and not sideswiping at it. So if the script says, put the pen down, just put the pen down – don’t think of another way of doing it. Just put the pen down and see what that teaches you.There are people I haven’t worked with, like Robert Lepage, who are enormous influences, who show why the theatre goes on being an incandescent form. Then there are my more permanent collaborators. The feeling is that I have worked a lot with Deborah [Warner].I have, but I’ve worked with an enormous amount of directors. Working again with somebody, you have a developed sense of not worrying. I know she always spots the things that are missing, and that they can be fixed later, and that gives you the confidence to stay lost for longer. Her values and aesthetics are fantastic.Last year, you wrote that you had had a year full of death. How do you cope with grief?God, I really have to think about what I’m saying. It’s really hard. I think there is a seam of sorrow beneath most of our delights. I do accept that, but I’m always affronted and shocked by it. The problem with grief is that the object of it isn’t there. But I have had very few griefs – I’ve had a very privileged, easy life.Is there a plan?Being in the arts, making something, it’s the most fantastic privilege to be in an unknown territory. There is no plan about how anything is going to come out at the end when you start it. You have a hunch, you go towards it, it comes towards you and finally things meet. But it’s always unknown. Terrifying, actually.Are we all doomed?You know, in my twenties, I hoped we were all doomed. It seemed more glamorous. And in my thirties I definitely thought we were all doomed. In my forties I panicked that only I was doomed. And now I really have turned. Lately, I’ve been in an incredibly positive frame of mind. And that’s the only frame of mind worth having, because we are all doomed.”Mother Courage” is at the National Theatre until 8 DecemberDefining moments1958 Born in County Cork, Ireland1979 After a philosophy BA, joins Rada1982 Joins the National Theatre. Three years later joins the RSC1989 Plays Eileen Cole in My Left Foot. Stars in Persuasion (1995) and Jane Eyre (1996)1990 First of three Laurence Olivier Awards1997 Awarded honorary doctorate by Ireland’s National University, first of two2001 Awarded CBE2008 Directs the opera Riders to the SeaRead the extended interview.
Fiona Shaw – IMDb: Fiona Shaw, Actress: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1. Shaw was already an acknowledged stage actress before she made a name for herself in television and film. It wasn’t until the mid 1980s that director Jim Sheridan awarded her a role in his film My Left Foot (1989); the biographical film of Christy Brown, an Irishman confined to a body horribly crippled by cerebral palsy but found incredible …
Fiona Shaw, Gordon Clapp, & Eric Roberts Among 2013 United Solo Festival Winners: The fourth annual United Solo Theatre Festival concluded its run on November 24, 2013 at Theatre Row on 42nd Street in New York City. An awards ceremony was held that night, following the eight-week-long lineup of the world’s largest solo theatre festival, which offered more than 120 productions this season.
Fiona Shaw joins ‘True Blood’ cast: Irish actress Fiona Shaw (Harry Potter’s Aunt Petunia) has joined the cast of HBO’s True Blood, Deadline reports. Shaw’s character, Marnie, has been described as…
Fiona Shaw’s double life: By day she is filming the new Harry Potter movie. By night she is starring in a new play at the National. She talks to Rupert Christiansen
Fiona Shaw (NT 50th): Plays and performances at all three theatres at the National Theatre. Information on what’s on and calendar of performances and events and activities, locations, history, behind the scenes information on how we make theatre, and more. South Bank, London.
My botty best at summarizing from Wikipedia: Fiona Shaw (born fiona Mary Wilson; 10 July 1958) is an Irish actress and theatre and opera director . her other stage work includes playing the title role in Medea in the west end and on Broadway . she received her degree in philosophy at University College Cork . her theatrical roles include Celia in As You Like It (1984), Madame de Volanges in Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1985), Katherine in The Taming of Shaw notably played the male lead in Richard II, directed by Deborah Warner in 1995 . she has collaborated with Warner on a number of occasions, on both stage and screen . Shaw has also worked in film and television . in 2009, Shaw starred in Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin . the play was also staged in new york’s Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2011 . Shaw appeared in season her character leads a coven of necromancer witches who threaten the status quo in Bon Temps . in 2012, Shaw appeared in the National Theatre revival of Scenes from an Execution by Howard Bark
