Background

Tara Fitzgerald was born on September 18, 1967, Cuckfield, Sussex, England. She is the daughter of artist Michael Callaby and Irish portrait photographer Sarah Geraldine Fitzgerald.

She spent part of her childhood in the Bahamas, where her maternal grandfather ran a law firm. Her sister, Arabella, was born there. Following the family's return to England when she was three, Fitzgerald's parents separated, and her mother then married actor Norman Rodway. She has a half-sister from this marriage, Bianca Rodway. Her birth father, Callaby, died when she was 11. Her mother's aunt was actress Geraldine Fitzgerald; other cousins through the Fitzgerald family are the Irish novelist Jennifer Johnston and Irish actress Susan Fitzgerald.

Education

Following her graduation from Drama Centre London, Fitzgerald appeared as the daughter of a beauty queen in the comedy Hear My Song (1991).

Career

Fitzgerald came to international attention in 1993 when she starred with Hugh Grant in the Australian comedy Sirens. The film landed Fitzgerald an Australian Film Institute nomination for Best Actress in a Lead Role. Two years later she again appeared with Grant in the comedy The Englishman who Went up a Hill but Came down a Mountain. Fitzgerald appeared in a steady stream of independent feature films through the 1990s and 2000s, among them A Man of No Importance (1994), Brassed Off (1996), the Czech World War II fighter pilot drama Dark Blue World (2001), and the 2004 drama, Secret Passage (UK title: The Lion's Mouth), set during the Spanish Inquisition. In 2006, she appeared in In a Dark Place, and, in 2014, she played Miriam in Exodus: Gods and Kings.

Fitzgerald decided to expand her career into directing after becoming frustrated with what she saw as a lack of interesting roles for older actresses. She was one of 12 filmmakers selected for Film London's 2015 Microwave scheme, which provides training and mentoring to filmmakers who then pitch their ideas to a panel that selects the two best ideas for production, with budgets of £150,000 each.

Fitzgerald's first major stage role came in 1992 when she appeared opposite Peter O'Toole in Our Song at the Apollo Theatre. She has alternated between stage and screen for almost two decades, with frequent theatre roles. In 1995, she starred as Ophelia in Hamlet at London's Almeida Theatre, which led to her American stage debut. The production transferred across the Atlantic and played more than 90 performances on Broadway at the Belasco Theatre.

Since then, she has played Antigone in a national UK tour and Blanche Du Bois in Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire at the Bristol Old Vic and appeared in A Doll's House at the Donmar Warehouse. Fitzgerald has also appeared in Molière's The Misanthrope in 2009 at the Comedy Theatre (now the Pinter). She appeared in The Winters Tale at the RSC in 2013, performed as Lady Macbeth at Shakespeare's Globe theatre and appeared in Gaslight at the Royal and Derngate Theatre in 2015.

A veteran of more than twenty television programmes and mini-series, Fitzgerald has portrayed Victorian heroines and modern police detectives. Her first TV role was in the 1991 BBC production The Black Candle, set in Yorkshire in the 1880s. In 1992, she was featured in The Camomile Lawn. After her feature film success, she landed her first starring role in a television film, The Vacillations of Poppy Carew. She won Best Actress at the 1999 Reims International Television Festival for the costumes-and-pirates love story Frenchman's Creek. In 2006, she was featured in The Virgin Queen, before taking on the role of Dr. Eve Lockhart on Waking The Dead, joining that cast in 2007. She also had a recurring role on Game of Thrones, playing Selyse Baratheon.

Achievements

• 

  Tara Anne Cassandra Fitzgerald won the New York Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Featured Actress in a Play in 1995 as Ophelia in Hamlet. She also won the Best Actress Award at The Reims International Television Festival in 1999 for her role of Lady Dona St Columb in Frenchman's Creek.
  
  

Works

More photos

• movie

  • In a Dark Place

    (This modern adaptation of Henry James's classic gothic no...)

    2006
  • Capture The Castle

    (A love story set in 1930s England that follows 17-year-ol...)

    2003
  • Exodus: Gods and Kings

    (Acclaimed director Ridley Scott brings new life to the ep...)

    2014
  • 5 Children & It

    (Five children staying in their eccentric uncle's labyrint...)

    2004
  • Dark Blue World

    (After Czechoslovakia falls to the Nazis, intrepid pilot F...)

    2001
  • The Englishman Who Went Up A Hill But Came Down A Mountain

    (When an English cartographer must tell a Welsh village th...)

    1995
  • Child 44

    (Exiled secret police officer Leo Demidov (Tom Hardy) disc...)

    2015
  • Brassed Off!

    (The coal mine in a northern English village may be closin...)

    1996
  • Legend

    (Tom Hardy stars as twin gangsters Reggie and Ronnie Kray ...)

    2015
  • Sirens

    (When a painting is termed blasphemous, a young minister a...)

    1993
  • We are Happy

    (Sarah and Paul's best friends tell them the great news - ...)

    2015
  • A Man of No Importance

    (Alfie Byrne is a middle-aged bus conductor in Dublin in 1...)

    1994
  • Hear My Song

    (A British club owner searches for Irish tenor Josef Locke.)

    1991
  • Rancid aluminium

    (Pete in London inherits a company. The ambitious accounta...)

    2000

• TV series

  • Waking the Dead

    (Detective Superintendent Peter Boyd is the leader of a po...)

    2007
  • Game of Thrones

    (Nine noble families wage war against each other in order ...)

    2011

Views

Quotations: "In England, people are so repressed. It is all giggle-giggle and 'look at the shameless woman taking her clothes off.' When you are doing a nude scene you just have to take a deep breath and get on with it. I can't bear bedcovers-up-to-the-chin jobs."

"I like being in corsets! You end up feeling strapped into the production."

"The script was beautifully written. David (David Morrissey) was lovely to work with and he's a very gifted actor."

"I wondered at one stage whether I should stop acting altogether, but that was just rubbish. I love it."

"There is nowhere I would draw the line and nothing I wouldn't do on screen. It would be silly to limit yourself."

Personality

Tara Fitzgerald has an acrophobia.

Physical Characteristics: Height: 5' 5" (1,65 m)

Hair color: dark brown

Hair type: straight

Hair length: long hair

Distinct feature: cheekbones

Eye color: dark brown

Tara Fitzgerald has a deep husky voice.

Interests

• Artists

  Michael Callaby

Connections

In 2001, Fitzgerald married the American actor-director John Sharian, who directed her in the short film The Snatching of Bookie Bob. The couple separated in May 2003 and later divorced.

Father:

Michael Callaby

Mother:

Sarah FitzGerald

ex-spouse:

John Sharian

colleague:

Aidan Gillen

Aidan Gillen is an Irish actor.

colleague:

Kerry Ingram

Kerry Danielle Ingram is an English actress.

colleague:

Liam Cunningham

Liam Cunningham is an Irish award-winning actor with a long career on TV, stage, and film. He has appeared in films such as Clash of the Titans, Hunger, First Knight and Jude, and TV series including Outcasts, Camelot and Northanger Abbey. He is also known for playing Davos Seaworth in the HBO epic fantasy series Game of Thrones.

colleague:

Carice van Houten

Carice van Houten is a Dutch actress and singer. She is known for her role in the HBO’s fantasy TV series Game of Thrones as the Melisandre of Asshai. She also has a leading role in the TV film Suzy and for her role in the film, she won Golden Calf Award for Best Acting in a Television Drama.

References

• Christopher Reeve, Tara FitzGerald, The Dilley Sextuplets - June 12, 1995 People Weekly Magazine