Kristin Linklater

Kristin Linklater (22 April 1936 – 5 June 2020) was a Scottish vocal coach, acting teacher, actor, theatre director, and author, born in Edinburgh and raised in the Orkney Isles. Her father was the Scottish novelist Eric Linklater, through whom she was of partial Swedish descent, and her mother was social activist Marjorie MacIntyre. Her brothers Magnus and Andro Linklater are writers. She received her education at St Leonards School and Downe House School before training with Michael MacOwan and Iris Warren at LAMDA, where she subsequently taught voice for six years following her graduation.

During the 1960s, Linklater relocated to the United States, where she worked with the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario, Canada. From 1964 to 1978, she served as a vocal coach for acting companies led by Robert Whitehead, Harold Clurman, Elia Kazan, and Joseph Chaikin, among others. Concurrently, she taught voice in New York University's graduate theater program from 1965 to 1978. Her Broadway career included an appearance in 1983 in the drama The Corn Is Green.

In 1973, Linklater was a founding member of Shakespeare & Company, an acting troupe that was for many years in residence on the former estate of Edith Wharton in Lenox, Massachusetts. She served as co-director of the organization alongside Tina Packer. She departed in the mid-1990s to develop her own approach to voice for actors, drawing on the influence of her LAMDA teachers as well as the Alexander Technique. Her approach was oriented toward liberating the natural function of the vocal mechanism rather than building a prescribed vocal technique.

From 1990 to 1996, Linklater headed the Acting program at Emerson College, where she and Harvard psychologist Carol Gilligan led a group called the Company of Women, which examined Shakespeare from a woman's perspective. She later joined the Theatre Arts Division of Columbia University, where she held the title of professor emerita upon her retirement. She also taught residential courses in Orkney. In 2013, she established the Linklater Voice Centre in Quoyloo, Orkney, Scotland, to train students in voice technique, and that same year was made an honorary fellow of the University of the Highlands and Islands.

Among the actors Linklater trained were Sir Patrick Stewart, Donald Sutherland, Alfre Woodard, Mary Tyler Moore, Bill Murray, Angela Bassett, Courtney Vance, Sigourney Weaver, Sam Rockwell, and Bernadette Peters. Her published works on voice include Freeing the Natural Voice (1976) and Freeing Shakespeare's Voice (1992). Her son with James Lincoln Cormeny is actor Hamish Linklater, who starred in the Netflix miniseries Midnight Mass. Linklater died of a heart attack on 5 June 2020 at the age of 84.