Tara Fitzgerald

The stage came first and never stopped mattering. Tara Fitzgerald won the New York Drama Desk Award in 1995 for playing Ophelia in Hamlet, has done The Misanthrope in the West End and Ibsen's A Doll's House at the Donmar Warehouse, and her screen career reads like something she fits around theatre rather than the reverse.

The films start in 1991 with Hear My Song, and the mid 1990s are the strongest stretch: Estella Campion in Sirens, Betty in The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain, and then Gloria in Brassed Off, a film about a colliery band and a pit closure that is still the best thing she has been in. She is very good at playing composure with something moving underneath it, which is why period drama kept calling: Topaz Mortmain in I Capture the Castle, Marian in The Woman in White, Kat Ashley in The Virgin Queen, Mrs. Reed in Jane Eyre.

Television then handed her authority and she has held onto it. She appeared in more than thirty episodes of Waking the Dead from 2007 as Dr. Eve Lockhart, and the parts since have largely been women who control a room: Lady Hermoine Clarke in The ABC Murders, Tansy Bestigui in Strike, Sylvia Walsh in Requiem, Selyse Baratheon on Game of Thrones, Anne Huntley in Surface. Signora Volpe in 2022 finally gave her a series built around her own performance, as Isabel Vitale. Rise of the Footsoldier: Vengeance suggests she will also take a job purely for the fun of it, which is the healthiest sign on any actor's page.