Fiona Shaw

 ( Living People ) 

Shaw notably played the male lead in Richard II, directed by Deborah Warner in 1995. 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.Ben Brantly, Memory and Desire: Hearing Eliot's Passion, New York Times 18 November 1996

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).

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."Rupert Christiansen "Fiona Shaw's double life", The Daily Telegraph, 10 May 2002 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 2010, Shaw appeared in The Waste Land at Wilton's Music Hall, and in a National Theatre revival of London Assurance. In November 2010, Shaw starred in Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin alongside Alan Rickman and Lindsay Duncan. The play was also staged in New York's Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2011. In 2012, Shaw appeared in the National Theatre revival of Scenes from an Execution by Howard Barker. The world's largest solo theatre festival, United Solo, recognised her performance in The Testament of Mary on Broadway with the 2013 United Solo Special Award.

Shaw appeared in season four of the American 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.

In 2013, she starred as Catherine Greenshaw in Agatha Christie's Marple episode "Greenshaw's Folly".

In 2018, Shaw began portraying Carolyn Martens, the head of MI6's Russia-focused branch, in BBC America's Killing Eve. For her performance, she won the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role in a Television Series. Later the same year, she played a senior MI6 officer in Mrs Wilson. For her role as a counselor in Phoebe Waller-Bridge series Fleabag (2019) she received a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series nomination.

In 2020, she was listed at No. 29 on The Irish Times list of Ireland's greatest film actors.

Shaw starred in the Star Wars television series Andor as the Cassian Andor's adoptive mother, Maarva Andor. For her work in Andor, Shaw was nominated for a BAFTA Award for Best Supporting Actress.

In October 2022, Shaw was awarded an AudioFile Magazine Earphone Award for her performance of The Bullet That Missed, the third book in Richard Osman's The Thursday Murder Club series.

In 2024, she portrayed Rose Aguineau, a woman with a mysterious past who aids the protagonists, in season 4 of True Detective.

From 2002 to 2005, Shaw was the partner of English actress Saffron Burrows. She met Sri Lankan economist Sonali Deraniyagala after reading Deraniyagala's memoir, and they married in 2018. Shaw lives in Islington, North London, having previously lived in nearby Primrose Hill, "within earshot of London Zoo".

Shaw was raised Catholic, and in January 1997, she spent two weeks with the Tyburn Nuns at their convent.

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

• World Theatre – Working in the Theatre Seminar video at American Theatre Wing.org, January 2002
• Fiona Shaw interviewed by Sophie Elmhirst in New Statesman, September 2009
• Fiona Shaw (director) on Operabase