Gillian Hanna

Gillian Hanna (20 June 1944 – 18 August 2019) was a British actress, translator, and theatre founder born in Buxton, Derbyshire, United Kingdom, whose work spanned stage, film, television, and voice performance. She earned a First Class degree in Modern Languages from Trinity College, Dublin, and went on to build a career that encompassed both acting and translation.

As a translator, Hanna produced the original English translation for Gavin Richards' adaptation of Dario Fo's Accidental Death of an Anarchist, which achieved significant success with the Belt and Braces Roadshow Company between 1979 and 1981. Her linguistic work complemented a parallel career on stage and screen that extended across several decades.

In 1975, Hanna founded the Monstrous Regiment Theatre Company, a feminist theatre collective with which she remained for fifteen years. A production mounted by the company, Honor Moore's Mourning Pictures, opened at the Tricycle Theatre in 1981 with original music by Tony Haynes, and was subsequently broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in May 1982. Hanna later documented the company's history in Monstrous Regiment: A Collective Celebration, published by Nick Hern Books in 1991. An earlier publication, Feminism and Theatre, appeared in 1978 through the Department of Theatre at Dartington College of Arts. She also contributed an essay, "An Age Of Innocence," to the collection Trinity Tales: Trinity College in the Sixties.

Her television credits included the role of Mrs Gossage, a fragile typist teacher, in the sixth series of Grange Hill in 1983, and the role of Brenna Jordache in Brookside from 1993 to 1995, a Channel 4 soap opera storyline that became widely known for its "body under the patio" narrative.

Hanna's Broadway career brought her to New York in 2014, when she appeared in The Cripple of Inishmaan.