Patricia Conolly

Patricia Conolly is an Australian stage actress born on August 29, 1933, in Tabora, Tanzania. Her Broadway career spans from 1965 to 2018, encompassing a wide range of productions across drama and comedy.

Conolly began her performing life in Australia, where she was raised, before building an international career that took her to England's West End, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and the Chichester Festival Theatre under Laurence Olivier. She also worked with the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Canada and has been active across a broad range of American regional theaters, among them the Guthrie Theater, Hartford Stage Company, Old Globe Theatre, Arena Stage, and Seattle Repertory Theatre.

Her Broadway credits include To Kill a Mockingbird, The Front Page, Is He Dead?, The Enchanted April, Judgment at Nuremberg, Waiting in the Wings, Hedda Gabler at the Roundabout Theatre Company, The Sound of Music, The Heiress, A Small Family Business, The Circle, Blithe Spirit, The School for Scandal, You Can't Take It With You, We Comrades Three, and The Importance of Being Oscar. She also appeared in productions at the Lyceum Theatre with the APA Repertory Company under the direction of Ellis Rabb. At Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Conolly performed in Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia, directed by Jack O'Brien, and in an earlier production of A Streetcar Named Desire alongside Rosemary Harris, also directed by Rabb.

Off Broadway, her credits include House and Garden, Woman in Mind at Manhattan Theatre Club, Tartuffe, Born Again, The Importance of Being Earnest at Circle in the Square Theatre, The Real Inspector Hound, Gabriel at the Atlantic Theater Company, Beyond the Horizon at the Irish Repertory Theatre, Rasheeda Speaking at the New Group, and The Belle of Belfast at the Irish Repertory Theatre.

Throughout her career Conolly has taken on major classical roles including Viola, Isabella, Rosalind, Regan, Phaedra, Jocasta, Mrs. Alving, Nora, Blanche DuBois, and Amanda Wingfield. In addition to performing, she has directed and taught at numerous theater training programs, including the Old Globe Theatre and University of San Diego MFA program, the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, the Juilliard School, Florida Atlantic University, the University of Southern California, and Boston University. Conolly is the widow of actor Dan Bly, who died in 1973, and the mother of Emily Bly. She is currently married to actor Colin McPhillamy.