Tara Fitzgerald

Tara Fitzgerald (born 18 September 1967) is an English actress who has appeared in feature films, television, radio and the stage.^[1]

She won the New York Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Featured Actress in a Play in 1995 as Ophelia opposite Ralph Fiennes in Hamlet. She won the Best Actress Award at The Reims International Television Festival in 1999 for her role of Lady Dona St Columb in Frenchman's Creek. Fitzgerald's most recent role has been in the West End production of The Misanthrope at the Comedy Theatre^[2] with Damian Lewis and Keira Knightley, and in Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House at the Donmar Warehouse. Since 2007, Fitzgerald has appeared in more than 30 episodes of the BBC television series Waking the Dead.

Early life

Anne Tara G.F. Callaby was born in Cuckfield, Sussex, to Irish portrait photographer Sarah Geraldine Fitzgerald and English artist Michael Callaby. She has one sister, Arabella, and one half-sister, Bianca, both younger. The sisters are great-nieces of the late Irish-American stage and film actress Geraldine Fitzgerald. When she was still a child her family moved to Freeport, Bahamas, where her maternal grandfather, David Fitzgerald, practised law. Returning to England, her parents divorced when Tara was three years old. Three years later, her mother married English-born Irish-based actor Norman Rodway and the family began several years of journeying across Britain and Ireland.

Education and acting

Because of her stepfather's acting career, Fitzgerald attended primary schools in London, Glasgow, Dublin and Stratford-upon-Avon. When she was in her teens she and her family returned to South London. She was a pupil at Walsingham Girls' School in Clapham (now Thomas's Preparatory School, Clapham), but left at age 16 after passing her "O" level examinations to pursue acting. At 17 she left a course at Richmond College, Middlesex to audition for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, but she was not accepted. She spent two years as a waitress before entering drama school. She graduated from Drama Centre London in July 1990.

Film

Only months after graduation from drama school, Tara Fitzgerald appeared as the daughter of a beauty queen in the comedy Hear My Song. She came to international attention in 1993 when she starred with Hugh Grant in the Australian comedy Sirens. The film landed Fitzgerald an Australian Film Institute nomination for Best Actress in a Lead Role. Two years later she again appeared with Grant in the comedy The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain. Fitzgerald appeared in a steady stream of independent feature films through the 1990s and 2000s, among them the all-star cast in A Man of No Importance (1994), Brassed Off (1996), the Czech World War II fighter pilot drama Dark Blue World (2001), and the 2004 drama, Secret Passage, set during the Spanish Inquisition, (UK title: The Lion's Mouth).^[3] In 2006 she appeared in In a Dark Place, and in 2014 she played Miriam in Ridley Scott's Exodus: Gods and Kings.

Stage

Fitzgerald's first major stage role came in 1992 when she appeared opposite Peter O'Toole in Our Song at the Apollo Theatre. She has alternated between stage and screen for almost two decades, with frequent theatre roles. In 1995, she starred as Ophelia opposite Ralph Fiennes in Hamlet at London's Almeida Theatre, which led to her American stage debut. The production transferred across the Atlantic and played more than 90 performances on Broadway at the Belasco Theatre.

Since then she has played Antigone in a national UK tour and Blanche Du Bois in Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire at the Bristol Old Vic^[4] and appeared with Gillian Anderson in A Doll's House at the Donmar Warehouse. Fitzgerald has also appeared in Moliere's The Misanthrope in 2009 with Keira Knightly and Damian Lewis at the Comedy Theatre (now the Pinter). She appeared alongside Jo Stone-Fewings in The Winters Tale at the RSC in 2013 and appeared in Gaslight at the Royal and Derngate Theatre in 2015. ^[5]

Television

A veteran of more than twenty television programmes and mini-series, Fitzgerald has portrayed Victorian heroines and modern police detectives. Her first TV role was in the 1991 BBC production The Black Candle, set in Yorkshire in the 1880s.^[3] In 1992, she was featured in The Camomile Lawn. After her feature film success, she landed her first starring role in a television film, The Vacillations of Poppy Carew.^[3] She won Best Actress at the 1999 Reims International Television Festival for the costumes-and-pirates love story Frenchman's Creek. In 2006 she was featured in The Virgin Queen, before taking on the role of Dr. Eve Lockhart on Waking The Dead; she joined the cast in 2007.^[3] She also had a recurring role on Game of Thrones, playing Selyse Baratheon.

Personal life

In 2001, Fitzgerald married the American actor-director John Sharian, who directed her in The Snatching of Bookie Bob. The couple separated in May 2003 and later divorced.^[6]

List of credits

Theatre

Film

Television

References

External links

• Tara Fitzgerald at the Internet Movie Database