Lisa O'Hare

Lisa Jane O'Hare, born on 11 November 1983 in Morecambe, Lancashire, England, is an English actress whose career spans West End and Broadway musical theatre as well as American prime-time television. She trained as a ballet dancer from the age of 11 at the Royal Ballet School, attending through age 16, and her early performance work reflected that background, including appearances in dance-oriented productions such as Alice and the Others at Sadler's Wells and Defile at the Royal Opera House.

O'Hare entered musical theatre through the original London production of Mary Poppins, joining the company in December 2004 as both an ensemble member and understudy to Laura Michelle Kelly in the title role. She departed in July 2005 before returning to the production on 6 November 2006, this time assuming the title role on a full-time basis. Replacing Scarlett Strallen, she became the third actress to hold the West End title role, with her final performance in the London company taking place on 19 May 2007. She later reprised the role in the National UK Tour of Mary Poppins, taking over from Caroline Sheen on 27 October 2008 in Edinburgh and continuing through Manchester and Cardiff until the tour closed on 18 April 2009. In April 2012, she returned to the role again for the Perth, Australia season of the production, with Matt Lee playing Bert. In 2015, she once more reprised the role in the Mary Poppins musical in Zurich, Switzerland.

Between her two stints with the London Mary Poppins company, O'Hare joined Cameron Mackintosh's National UK Tour of My Fair Lady on 28 September 2005 at the Palace Theatre in Manchester, sharing the role of Eliza Doolittle with Amy Nuttall. The tour concluded on 12 August 2006 at the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff. She subsequently reprised the role in the national US tour of My Fair Lady, which opened on 12 September 2007 in Tampa, Florida, alongside Christopher Cazenove as Henry Higgins, who had also appeared opposite her in the UK tour. The US tour closed on 22 June 2008 in Tempe, Arizona. Her performance earned her a nomination for the 2008 Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Non-Resident Production, and she won the 26th Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Musical Performance. She later played Eliza Doolittle again at Chicago's Lyric Opera, opposite Richard E. Grant as Henry Higgins.

On 6 July 2008, O'Hare joined former and future Mary Poppins title performers Scarlett Strallen and Caroline Sheen in performing "Practically Perfect" at a special concert of George Stiles and Anthony Drewe's songs, titled "A Spoonful of Stiles and Drewe," held at Her Majesty's Theatre. A recording of the concert was released on CD in December 2008. That same summer, from 6 August to 13 September 2008, she starred in the title role of Gigi at Regent's Park Open Air Theatre. In 2011, she played Sally Bowles in Cabaret for the Reprise Theatre Company at the Freud Playhouse, winning the LA Drama Critics Circle Award for Lead Performance.

O'Hare's Broadway career spans 2007 to 2019 and includes three productions. She originated the role of Sibella Hallward in the Broadway musical A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder, a part later assumed by Scarlett Strallen. She also appeared on Broadway in My Fair Lady and The Height of the Storm.

Her American television debut came in 2010 with a guest role as Jenny in "Last Woman Standing," an episode of TNT's The Closer during its sixth season. Shortly thereafter she appeared as Kitty Canary in the third-season premiere of ABC's Castle, playing the owner and performer of a burlesque bar. Also in October 2010, she guest-starred as Marie Murphy in "Jailbreak," an episode of J.J. Abrams's NBC series Undercovers. In 2018, she joined the cast of NBC's New Amsterdam as Georgia Goodwin, appearing opposite Ryan Eggold. O'Hare is a member of SAG/AFTRA and Actors' Equity and resides in the village of Hest Bank, Lancaster, with her husband and children.