Background
Aitken was born in Dublin, the daughter of Sir William Aitken, a Conservative Member of Parliament, and Penelope Aitken, whose father was John Maffey, 1st Baron Rugby.
Actor screenwriter writer author
Aitken was born in Dublin, the daughter of Sir William Aitken, a Conservative Member of Parliament, and Penelope Aitken, whose father was John Maffey, 1st Baron Rugby.
She attended Sherborne School for Girls in Dorset and Street Anne"s College, Oxford, where she graduated with a degree in English Language and Literature.
Her grandfather was the United Kingdom Representative to Ireland (1939-1949). She is a great-niece of newspaper magnate and war-time minister Lord Beaverbrook. She has directed several plays in the West End and on Broadway.
In 2011, she directed Frank Langella in Manitoba and Boy on Broadway.
She is a Visiting Lecturer at Yale, New York University 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 British Academy of Film and Television Arts award), The Fool (1990), The Grotesque (1995), Fierce Creatures (1997), Jinnah (1998) and Asylum (2005).
She is the author of A Girdle Round the Earth, a story of some of the more remarkable women travellers of the last 200 years, and Style: Acting in High Comedy, published in 1996, which contends that "High comedies 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.".