Fiona Shaw and Irish Film London

“I'm very proud to be part of something that has got this foot in this big metropolis as well as it's not just a Dublin film festival, It's an Irish film festival in London.” -Fiona Shaw on becoming an IFL Patron

Becoming a patron of IFL as we approached our very special tenth anniversary, we couldn’t be more excited to continue working with Fiona Shaw. She has ranged wide in her career from comedy to the greatest classical roles. Whether acting or directing, Fiona continues to make exceptional work for stage and screen.

Who is Fiona Shaw?

Born in County Cork to parents steeped in the sciences, Fiona could have followed her surgeon father into medicine or her physicist mother into research or the laboratory, but, luckily for us, Fiona chose drama as her métier. 

Fiona trained at London's famous Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and graduated in 1983, having won the prestigious Bancroft Gold Medal. She quickly made her professional stage debut as Rosaline in Love's Labour's Lost and a year later was on the stage of the National Theatre, garnering much critical praise for her role as Julia in Sheridan's The Rivals. 

TV and film roles followed including The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1984) and the award-winning, My Left Foot (1989), even as Fiona came to greater acclaim on the stage, with lead roles at the RSC in The Taming of the Shrew (1987) and Electra (1989). Fiona won Best Actress at the 1990 Olivier Awards for her lead roles in three major plays of the 1989 theatre season: Electra, As You Like It and The Good Person of Szechwan.

Successes in Theatre

Among the many great classical and modern roles Fiona has played on both sides of the Atlantic, she won the Olivier Award for Best Actress for Machinal in Stephen Daldry’s 1993 NT production alongside fellow Irish actor, Ciaran Hinds, and, in New York, the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding One-person Show for her acclaimed solo performance in The Wasteland (1996). She also famously played Richard II in a groundbreaking production for the National Theatre in 1995, with creative collaborator of more than thirty years, Deborah Warner.  

This fruitful partnership has brought many incredible productions to the stage and screen such as the award-winning Medea (2001/3), which garnered gongs in London and New York, and Beckett’s Happy Days, which both women approached with some trepidation after their 1994 Footfalls production was stopped after only a few performances by the Beckett estate. No such fate for Happy Days. Fiona won Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actress in a Play and the Best Actress Olivier of 2008. Of the Shaw and Warner collaboration, John Peter’s of The Sunday Times wrote that, “They are making theatre that is an adventure, a journey of the mind, a discovery of other ages, other people, other countries, other minds.” 

In 2003, Fiona was invested with an honorary CBE for services to Drama. Accepting this award would, she admits, have been a more complicated issue had her parents still been alive, but she sees awards of this nature as, “markers in your life. They help you to ask: ‘Well, what else do I want to do?’”

From Stage to Household Name

However, it was playing the witch-hating Aunt Petunia in the Harry Potter films, that brought Fiona to a much wider audience and made her a household name. Other beloved TV roles include, conversely, her Marnie Stonebrook (a witch possessed of an even more powerful witch) in HBO’s True Blood (2011), a BAFTA Award winning performance as Carolyn Martens in Killing Eve and, her guest role in Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s phenomenally successful Fleabag for which she was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award For Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy series.

Recent Work

Most recently, Fiona Shaw has worked alongside fellow patron Saoirse Ronan, in 2020's Ammonite, directed by Francis Lee. In the same year Shaw was also a supporting role in one of Netflix’s most popular own releases Enola Holmes. Shaw will also be acting alongside Pheobe Waller-Bridge again, amongst a stellar cast including Ryan Reynolds, Louis Gossett Jr., Steve Carrel, in director John Krasinski's upcoming fantasy comedy Imaginary Friends, expected late 2023.