Celebrated screen and stage actor Fiona Shaw has reflected on the death of her brother Peter, who was killed in a car accident just before she made her debut with the Royal Shakespeare Company.
The 66-year-old star, who’s featured in the Harry Potter franchise, Killing Eve, Bad Sisters and Phoebe Waller Bridge’s BBC comedy Fleabag, was in her mid-twenties when the family tragedy occurred.
Speaking to Jessie and Lennie Ware on their Table Manners podcast, Shaw said her brother was “lovely” – a schoolboy rugby player, who was about to go on to play for their county, having turned 18.
“It was terrible. I’d just moved to London,” she said. “I’d been to drama school but I’d just moved to the Royal Shakespeare Company. It was my debut. It was a big deal for me but my poor parents couldn’t come. They were in a terrible state at the time.”
Shaw had returned from Cork, Ireland, for the interview where she was visiting her 99-year-old mother, Mary, whose grief for Peter only relented in her later years as her memory faded.
“The good thing about my mother’s age: it’s soothed that pain now,” she said. “I think, it’s so long ago and she’s so old. She must have been about 50 something [when Peter was killed].”
Shaw went on to be nominated for an Olivier Award for her performance as Celia in Shakespeare’s pastoral comedy As You Like It, aged 28.
She scooped the Olivier Award for Best Actress four years later, for her performances in Electra, As You Like It and Bertolt Brecht’sThe Good Person of Sichuan.
The interview comes alongside the release of Shaw’s latest project: the Michael Pearce thriller Echo Valley, which she stars in alongside Julianne Moore and Sydney Sweeney.
Moore and Sweenet play a mother and her drug-abusing daughter, who shows up on her doorstep inexplicably covered in blood.
“Film parts…what I’m looking for is the new,” Shaw said. “New directors. Young directors who are looking at things with another angle…you want people who’ve got vision.”
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