Maria Friedman

Maria Friedman is a Swiss-born British actress and director whose career has centered on musical theatre in the West End and on Broadway. Born on 19 March 1960 in Switzerland, she is the second of four children of Clair Llewelyn, a concert pianist, and Leonard Friedman, a classical violinist and member of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Her father came from a Russian-Jewish immigrant family and her mother is English. The family relocated to Germany, where Friedman began her schooling, before her parents divorced and her mother brought the children back to England. Her elder brother was the classical violinist Richard Friedman. Her younger sisters are theatre director and producer Sonia Friedman, and Dr. Sarah Beecham, an academic researcher at the University of Limerick, Ireland. Friedman grew up in Birmingham, United Kingdom.

Her stage career began in earnest in the late 1980s. In 1989 she played Hayyah in Joshua Sobol's Ghetto at the Olivier Theatre in London, and the following year she appeared in the Royal National Theatre production of Stephen Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George as Dot. In 1992 she played Mary Flynn in a production of Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along at the Haymarket Theatre in Leicester, and also appeared in Square Rounds. A 1994 one-woman cabaret, By Special Arrangement, earned her a Laurence Olivier Award, the first of three she would win. A follow-up show, By Extra Special Arrangement, came in 1995.

Friedman originated the role of Fosca in the original London production of Sondheim's Passion at the Queen's Theatre in 1996, winning the 1997 Olivier Award for Best Actress in a Musical. She then starred as Roxie Hart in Chicago at the Adelphi Theatre beginning in 1998. In 2003 she took on the role of Mother in the West End production of Ragtime at the Piccadilly Theatre, a performance that brought her a third Olivier Award for Best Actress in a Musical in 2004. Across her career she has received seven Laurence Olivier Award nominations in total.

In 2004 Friedman originated the role of Marian Halcombe in Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Woman in White in the West End, and she brought that role to Broadway in 2005, earning a Theatre World Award in 2006. During the Broadway previews she was diagnosed with stage 1 breast cancer and underwent surgery to have the lump removed. She returned to the stage less than a week after the operation, performing on the official opening night and announcing plans to begin radiation treatment in December 2005. The production closed on 22 February 2006 after 109 performances, a run affected in part by her absences and those of co-star Michael Ball due to illness. After the closing was announced, Friedman remained with the show for its duration rather than taking a planned six-week absence, during which Judy Kuhn had been scheduled to replace her.

Beyond her principal stage roles, Friedman participated in Hey, Mr. Producer!, the concert celebrating the works of Cameron Mackintosh, performing "You Could Drive a Person Crazy," "Broadway Baby," and "How Many Tears?" She also appeared in Sondheim Tonight at London's Barbican Centre, singing "Losing My Mind" from Follies and "More" from the film Dick Tracy. In July 2007 she sang Mrs. Lovett opposite Bryn Terfel in four concert performances of Sweeney Todd at London's Royal Festival Hall, and in 2010 she appeared as a soloist in the BBC Proms tribute to Sondheim at the Royal Albert Hall. She has performed one-woman shows at venues including the Café Carlyle in New York City and Trafalgar Studios in London, and has released several solo albums, among them Maria Friedman, Maria Friedman Live, Now and Then, and Maria Friedman Celebrates The Great British Songbook. She can also be heard on numerous cast recordings. In 1999 she played the narrator in the straight-to-video film of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. From 2014 to 2017 she played Elaine Peacock in the British television series EastEnders, a role subsequently recast with Harriet Thorpe in 2023.

Friedman has built a substantial parallel career as a director. Her 2013 West End revival of Merrily We Roll Along began at the Menier Chocolate Factory in November 2012 before transferring to the Harold Pinter Theatre from April to July 2013, winning the 2014 Laurence Olivier Award for Best Musical Revival. She directed a subsequent production of the show at the Huntington Theatre Company in Boston in September 2017, followed by an off-Broadway production at New York Theatre Workshop in 2022 based on her Menier Chocolate Factory staging. That production transferred to Broadway at the Hudson Theatre in 2023 and won the 2024 Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical, the 2024 Drama League Award for Outstanding Revival of a Musical, and a 2024 Special Citation from the New York Drama Critics Circle. The Broadway revival received six additional Tony nominations and won three further awards: Best Actor in a Musical for Jonathan Groff, Best Featured Actor in a Musical for Daniel Radcliffe, and Best Orchestrations for Jonathan Tunick. Friedman herself received a 2024 Tony Award nomination for Best Direction of a Musical. A filmed version of the production was released in December 2025. Among her other directing credits, she staged a revival of High Society at the Old Vic Theatre in 2015 and a revival of Stepping Out at the Vaudeville Theatre in the West End in 2017.

Friedman married dancer Roland Brine in 1985; the couple divorced in 2002. She married actor Adrian Der Gregorian in 2006. She has two sons: Toby Sams-Friedman, born in 1994, an actor, with director and writer Jeremy Sams; and Alfred Friedman, born in 2002, also an actor, with cameraman Oleg Poupko.