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Maria Penelope Katharine Aitken (born 12 September 1945) is an Irish-born, British theatre director, teacher, actress, and writer.
As an actress, Aitken has been twice nominated at the Olivier Award, in 1980 for Private Lives and in 1985 for Waste. Her performance in the film A Fish Called Wanda (1988) earned her a nomination for the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role.
She has directed several plays in the West End and on Broadway. Her production of The 39 Steps, which ran in London for nine years, also played three years on Broadway and won Olivier and Tony Awards. In 2011, she directed Frank Langella in Man and Boy on Broadway. She is a Visiting Lecturer at Yale, NYU and Juilliard drama schools. Her extensive acting career includes leading roles at the Royal National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company and in the West End. She has played more Noël Coward leads than any other actress. Her film career includes appearances in Doctor Faustus (1967), Mary, Queen of Scots (1971), Half Moon Street (1986), A Fish Called Wanda (1988) (for which she was nominated for a BAFTA award), The Fool (1990), The Grotesque (1995), Fierce Creatures (1997), Jinnah (1998) and Asylum (2005).
In 1984, Aitken co-wrote and starred in the sitcom Poor Little Rich Girls alongside Jill Bennett. She is the author of A Girdle Round the Earth, a story of some of the remarkable women travellers of the last 200 years, and Style: Acting in High Comedy, published in 1996, which contends that "High comedy are not bloodless, refined, wordy plays — their themes are sex, money and social advancement. They contain a splendid contradiction: wit and elegance at the service of man's basest drives."
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