Fiona Shaw

Fiona Shaw
Shaw at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, January 16, 2011
Born	Fiona Mary Wilson 10 July 1958 (1958-07-10) County Cork, Republic of Ireland
Occupation	Actress, director
Years active	1983–present

Fiona Shaw, CBE (born Fiona Mary Wilson on 10 July 1958) is an Irish actress and theatre director. Although to international audiences she is probably most familiar for her role as Petunia Dursley in the Harry Potter films, she is an accomplished classical actress. Shaw was awarded an honorary CBE in 2001.

Early life

Shaw was born as Fiona Mary Wilson in County Cork, Ireland to a mixed-religious couple, and was raised Roman Catholic. Her father was an optic surgeon and her mother was a physicist.^{[citation needed]}

She 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. She received much acclaim as Julia in the National Theatre production of Richard Sheridan's The Rivals (1983).^{[citation needed]}

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.

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 five of the Harry Potter films in which she played Harry Potter's insufferable aunt Petunia Dursley. 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.^{[citation needed]}

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." 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.^{[citation needed]}

Shaw appeared in The Waste Land at Wilton's Music Hall in January 2010 and in a National Theatre revival of London Assurance in March 2010. In November 2010, Shaw starred in Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin alongside Alan Rickman and Lindsay Duncan.

Shaw has become a regular cast member of the TV Show True Blood. Shaw’s character, Marnie Stonebrook, has been described as an underachieving palm reader who is spiritually possessed by an actual witch. Her character leads a coven of necromancer witches who threaten the status quo in Bon Temps, erasing most of Eric Northman's memories and leaving him almost helpless when he tries to break up their coven.

Personal life

She has been romantically linked in the press with actress Saffron Burrows. The two appeared together in the National Theatre's production of The PowerBook, a play based on the novel of the same name by Jeanette Winterson in which they played lovers. In a December 2009 interview, Shaw described herself as "very happily" single.

Credits

• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1985) (TV series)
• The Taming Of The Shrew (RSC 1987)
• Electra (RSC 1988)
• 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)
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 1 (2010)
• Noi Credevamo (2010)
• Mother Courage and her Children (NT)
• London Assurance (NT)
• The Tree of Life (2011)
• True Blood (2011)

Other projects, contributions

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

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
• Fiona Shaw interviewed by Sophie Elmhirst on New Statesman, September 2009