Charlotte Keatley (born 5 January 1960, London) is an English playwright. She studied drama at the Victoria University of Manchester and as a postgraduate at the University of Leeds. She has worked as a journalist for Performance magazine, The Yorkshire Post , the Financial Times and the BBC. She co-devised and performed in Dressing for Dinner, staged at the Theatre Workshop, Leeds, in 1983, and set up the performance art company, Royal Balle, in 1984.
Her first play, My Mother Said I Never Should , which she wrote in 1985, was first performed at the Contact Theatre, Manchester, in 1987, and won both the Royal Court/George Devine Award and the Manchester Evening News Theatre Award for Best New Play.The play was revised for a successful run at the Royal Court Theatre in 1989, and in 1990 she was nominated for the Laurence Olivier Most Promising Newcomer Award.
My Mother Said I Never Should was published in the UK by Methuen in 1988, and has been studied as an A-level set text for a number of years. It has subsequently been translated into 22 languages and has become the most performed play in the English language written by a woman. Waiting for Martin, a short monologue about the Falklands War, was produced by the English Shakespeare Company in 1987.
Charlotte Keatley was Judith E. Wilson Fellow in English at Cambridge University in 1989 and Writer in Residence for the New York Stage and Film Company in 1991. Later that year she co-directed at the Edinburgh Festival the first stage adaptation of Heathcote Williams' hefty polemical poem Autogeddon. It won an Edinburgh Festival Fringe First award.
She wrote the screenplay to Falling Slowly, for Channel 4, and the children's drama, Badger, for Granada Television. Her work for radio includes ten episodes of the BBC series Citizens, the play Is Green The Same For You (1989), and an adaptation of Mrs Gaskell's novel North and South .
In 2003, Charlotte Keatley was commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company to write an epic play set in Georgia and the Caucasus entitled All the Daughters of War.
Miranda Jane Richardson is an English actress. She made her film debut playing Ruth Ellis in Dance with a Stranger (1985) and went on to receive Academy Award nominations for Damage (1992) and Tom & Viv (1994). A seven-time BAFTA Award nominee, she won the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for Damage. She has also been nominated for seven Golden Globe Awards, winning twice for Enchanted April (1992) and the TV film Fatherland (1994). In 1996, one critic asserted that she is "the greatest actress of our time in any medium" after she appeared in Orlando at the Edinburgh Festival.
Sir Thomas Daniel Courtenay is an English actor who came to prominence in the early 1960s with a succession of films, including The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), Billy Liar (1963), King Rat (1965), Doctor Zhivago (1965) and The Night of the Generals (1967). Since the mid-1960s, he has been known primarily for his work in the theatre, although he received Academy Award nominations for Doctor Zhivago and the film adaptation of The Dresser (1983), which he had performed in the West End and on Broadway. He was created a Knight Bachelor in February 2001 for his services to cinema and theatre.
Dame Janet Suzman, is a South African/British actress who enjoyed a successful early career in the Royal Shakespeare Company, later replaying many Shakespearean roles, among others, on TV. In her first film, Nicholas and Alexandra (1971), her performance as Empress Alexandra Feodorovna earned her several honours, including a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress.
Roger William Allam is an English actor, known primarily for his stage career, although he has performed in film, television and radio.
Amanda Root is an English stage and screen actress and a former voice actress for children's programmes.
Rona Munro is a Scottish writer. She has written plays for theatre, radio, and television. Her film work includes Ken Loach's Ladybird, Ladybird (1994), Oranges and Sunshine (2010) for Jim Loach and Aimée & Jaguar (1999), co-authored by German director Max Färberböck.
Niamh Cusack is an Irish actress. Born to a family with deep roots in the performing arts, Cusack has been involved as a performer since a young age. She has served with the UK's two leading theatre companies, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal National Theatre and has performed in a long line of major stage productions since the mid-1980s. She has made numerous appearances on television including a long-running role as Dr. Kate Rowan in the UK series Heartbeat (1992–1995) which made her a household name and favourite. She has often worked as a voice actress on radio, and her film credits include a starring role in In Love with Alma Cogan (2011).
Jack Shepherd is an English actor, playwright, theatre director, saxophone player and jazz pianist. He is known for his television roles, most notably the title role in Trevor Griffiths' series about a young Labour MP Bill Brand (1976), and the detective drama Wycliffe (1993–98). His film appearances include All Neat in Black Stockings (1969), Wonderland (1999) and The Golden Compass (2007). He won the 1983 Olivier Award for Best Actor in a New Play for the original production of Glengarry Glen Ross.
Neil Vivian Bartlett, OBE, is a British director, performer, translator, and writer. He was one of the founding members of Gloria, a production company established in 1988 to produce his work along with that of Nicolas Bloomfield, Leah Hausman and Simon Mellor. His work has garnered several awards, including the 1985 Perrier Award, the Time Out Dance Umbrella Award, a Writers Guild Award, a Time Out Theatre Award, and the Special Jury Prize at the Cork Film Festival. His production of The Dispute won a Time Out Award for Best Production in the West End and the 1999 TMA Best Touring Production award. He was appointed an OBE in 2000 for his services to the arts.
Rebecca Lenkiewicz is a British playwright. She is best known as the author of Her Naked Skin (2008), which was the first original play written by a living female playwright to be performed on the Olivier stage of the Royal National Theatre.
David Threlfall is an English stage, film and television actor and director. He is best known for playing Frank Gallagher in Channel 4's series Shameless. He has also directed several episodes of the show. In April 2014, he portrayed comedian Tommy Cooper in a television film entitled Tommy Cooper: Not Like That, Like This. In 2014, he starred alongside Jude Law in the thriller Black Sea.
Dame Harriet Mary Walter is an English stage and screen actress. Her film appearances include Sense and Sensibility (1995), The Governess (1998), Villa des Roses (2002), Atonement (2007) and Man Up (2015). On television she starred as Natalie Chandler in the ITV drama series Law & Order: UK (2009–14), as Lady Prudence Shackleton in four episodes of Downton Abbey (2013–15), and as Clementine Churchill in The Crown (2016). She was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 2011 for services to drama.
David Schofield is an English actor. He is best known for his role as Ian Mercer in the films Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006) and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (2007). He also appeared in the films An American Werewolf in London (1981), Gladiator (2000), From Hell (2001), Valkyrie (2008), The Wolfman (2010) and Darkest Hour (2017).
Raza Jaffrey is an English actor and singer, who starred as Neal Hudson on the CBS TV medical drama Code Black. He is best known for playing Zafar Younis on the BBC One spy drama series Spooks. In 2014, he played Pakistani Lieutenant Colonel Aasar Khan in season 4 of the Showtime series Homeland.
David Edgar is a British playwright and writer who has had more than sixty of his plays published and performed on stage, radio and television around the world, making him one of the most prolific dramatists of the post-1960s generation in Great Britain. He was resident playwright at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 1974–5 and has been a board member there since 1985. Awarded a Fellow in Creative Writing at Leeds Polytechnic, he was made a Bicentennial Arts Fellow (US) (1978–79).
Edward Hall is an English theatre and film director who founded the all-male Propeller Shakespeare company of which he is Artistic Director, in 1997. He also became Artistic Director of Hampstead Theatre in 2010. He is known for directing Shakespeare productions, musicals such as Sunny Afternoon and multiple screen productions, including William Boyd's TV adaptation of Restless.
Theatre of United Kingdom plays an important part in British culture, and the countries that constitute the UK have had a vibrant tradition of theatre since the Renaissance with roots going back to the Roman occupation.
Debbie Horsfield is an English theatre and television writer and producer.
John Retallack is a British playwright and director.
Howard Charles is a British actor who is best known for his portrayal of Porthos in the BBC's 2014 adaptation of Dumas's The Three Musketeers, entitled The Musketeers.
