Tara FitzGerald

Tara Anne Cassandra Fitzgerald, born in 1967 in London, England, is an English actress whose career spans film, television, radio, and stage. She trained at Drama Centre London before embarking on a professional career that has taken her from British television to international film productions and Broadway.

Fitzgerald was born to artist Michael Callaby and Irish portrait photographer Sarah Geraldine Fitzgerald. She spent part of her early childhood in the Bahamas, where her maternal grandfather operated a law firm, and her sister Arabella was born there. When the family returned to England and she was approximately three years old, her parents separated. Her mother subsequently married Irish actor Norman Rodway, and Fitzgerald has a half-sister from that marriage, Bianca Rodway. Her father, Callaby, died when she was eleven. Her great-aunt was actress Geraldine Fitzgerald, and her extended family through the Fitzgerald line includes Irish novelist Jennifer Johnston and Irish actress Susan Fitzgerald.

Her first major stage role came in 1992, when she appeared opposite Peter O'Toole in Our Song at the Apollo Theatre. That same year she was featured in the television production The Camomile Lawn, having made her television debut the previous year in the 1991 BBC production The Black Candle, set in Yorkshire in the 1880s. Also in 1991, she appeared in the comedy film Hear My Song, playing the daughter of a beauty queen. Her film profile rose considerably in 1993 when she starred alongside Hugh Grant in the Australian production Sirens, which earned her an Australian Film Institute nomination for Best Actress in a Lead Role. She appeared with Grant again in The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain in 1995. Her film work through the 1990s and 2000s included A Man of No Importance (1994), Brassed Off (1996), the Czech World War II drama Dark Blue World (2001), and Secret Passage (2004), set during the Spanish Inquisition. In 2006 she appeared in In a Dark Place, and in 2014 she played Miriam in Exodus: Gods and Kings.

Fitzgerald's Broadway debut came in 1995, when she played Ophelia in a production of Hamlet that originated at London's Almeida Theatre before transferring to the Belasco Theatre in New York, where it ran for more than ninety performances. The role earned her the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Featured Actress in a Play that same year. Her subsequent stage work has been extensive. She has played Antigone on a national UK tour, performed as Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire at the Bristol Old Vic, and appeared in Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House at the Donmar Warehouse. She took on the role of Lady Macbeth at Shakespeare's Globe, appeared in Molière's The Misanthrope at the Comedy Theatre in 2009, performed in The Winter's Tale with the RSC in 2013, and appeared in Gaslight at the Royal and Derngate Theatre in 2015.

On television, Fitzgerald won Best Actress at the 1999 Reims International Television Festival for her portrayal of Lady Dona St Columb in Frenchman's Creek. She appeared in The Virgin Queen in 2006 and joined the cast of the BBC series Waking the Dead in 2007, ultimately appearing in more than thirty episodes as Eve Lockhart. She also played the recurring role of Selyse Baratheon in the HBO series Game of Thrones. In 2020, she appeared as Lady Templemore in Belgravia, a historical drama based on Julian Fellowes's 2016 novel of the same name.

In addition to her acting work, Fitzgerald pursued directing after expressing frustration with the availability of roles for older actresses. She was among twelve filmmakers selected for Film London's 2015 Microwave scheme, a program that provides training and mentoring to filmmakers who then pitch projects for production with budgets of £150,000 each. Fitzgerald married English actor-director John Sharian in 2001; the couple separated in May 2003 and later divorced. She resides in London.