Orla Brady (born 28 March 1961) is an Irish theatre, television, and film actress born in Dublin. She started her career as a touring theatre performer and began appearing regularly in television roles in the 1990s. She has been nominated for several awards from the Irish Film & Television Academy for her television work. Major or recurring TV roles continued in Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, with Brady appearing in over thirty series, limited series, or television movies up to the 2020s. This included her portrayal of two supporting characters in the CBS-Paramount+ series, Star Trek: Picard.
Brady's first role in film was in Words Upon the Window Pane in 1994. An early starring film role in the RTÉ-BBC co-production A Love Divided, won her the 1999 Golden Nymph Best Actress Award. Brady has since appeared in more than a dozen feature films and several short films, and was named in the 2020 list of Ireland's greatest film actors, published by The Irish Times.
Brady married in 2002 and lives in Los Angeles and Dublin.
Early life and education
Orla Brady was born in Dublin,[1] the daughter of Catherine and Patrick Brady,[citation needed] one of four children. At one time, her parents were the owners of an establishment called Oak Bar, in Temple Bar, Dublin.[2] She lived in Bray, County Wicklow, Ireland, from birth until the age of seven.[3][2] She was educated at a convent of the Ursulines in Cabinteely, Dublin.[2]
Brady began training in performance in 1986, with a year in Paris;[1] she studied at L'École Philippe Gaulier,[4] and secured a place at Marcel Marceau's École Internationale de Mimodrame de Paris.[5] As she spoke of the time in interview, "there was a lot of clowning around, buffoonery and fencing. It was then that my own style kind of blossomed."[1]
Brady's first television role was a minor one as a bank clerk in the series Minder;[11] her first film part followed in 1994 when she was cast as Vanessa in Words Upon the Window Pane.[6][12][13]
Substantial roles have included the RTÉ-BBC co-production of A Love Divided,[11] where she portrayed Sheila Cloney, a woman whose conflict with the Catholic Church over her child's education leads to an anti-Protestant boycott, a story based on real events in 1950s Fethard-on-Sea in County Wexford,[14] for which she won the 1999 Golden Nymph Best Actress Award.[6][15] She also played one of the four lead characters in the BBC drama series, Mistresses, portraying lawyer Siobhan Dillon. She has appeared in RTÉ's Proof,[11] and had roles in films such as Words Upon the Window Pane (1994), The Luzhin Defence (2000), How About You (2007), and 32A (2007).[7]
Since moving to California in 2001, Brady has also appeared in Family Law,[11] where she played Naoise O'Niell, a series that ran for 3 years on CBS. She also starred in Nip/Tuck, a US drama about plastic surgeons (in which she played Dr. Jordan), and starred as Claire Stark in Shark (2008).[11] In 2008, she appeared in "Firewall", the second episode of the BBC series Wallander.[16] She also appeared as Meredith Gates, a fleecing art collector who herself is conned in the first series of the British series Hustle.[11] Commencing in 2009, Brady portrayed Elizabeth Bishop, the wife of Walter Bishop and the mother of Peter Bishop in the Fox television series Fringe.[17][6] In 2010, she played Catherine in the TV series The Deep,[7] alongside James Nesbitt, and starred as Katie Dartmouth in the TV series Strike Back.[7]
In 2012, she appeared in the ITV series Eternal Law as Mrs Sheringham, an angel who fell in love with a human and became mortal, and played Taryn in the Sky One series Sinbad.[18] In late 2013, she appeared as the Countess Vera Rossakoff in the television adaptation of The Labours of Hercules, part of the final series of Agatha Christie's Poirot alongside David Suchet.[19] Brady appeared in a special production in the BBC science-fiction series Doctor Who,[6] the 25 December 2013 Christmas special, The Time of the Doctor (as the character Tasha Lem).[20] In 2014, she filmed Banished, playing Anne Meredith.[21]
As of 2022, Brady has had a recurring role in the science fiction television series, Star Trek: Picard,[11] as Laris, wife of the now-deceased Zhaban (Jamie McShane), the two being former members of the Romulan Tal Shiar and now, workers in the wine production and home of Picard at his Chateau.[22][23]
Modelling images used in artwork
In the 1980s, while she was in her mid-20s, Brady modelled for an artists' guide publication. She recalled in 2008 that the studio shoot had paid about £50 for her day's work, at a time when she welcomed the income, with her acting career yet to take off.[24] Photographed in a number of dancing poses, the resulting series of figure studies featuring Brady appeared in the Illustrator's Figure Reference Manual.[lower-alpha 1] More than 25 years later, it was noted that one of these images of Brady, posing as part of a dancing couple, was the basis of the main figures in a widely-known painting, The Singing Butler, by artist Jack Vettriano. As stated by Vettriano in 2013, Brady's image had "later inspired [his] most famous painting, The Singing Butler". The identification of the pose study in the Illustrator's Manual with Vettriano's painting led to media reporting that he "owed his composition in part" to that publication. Vettriano, his agent, and Brady herself, have all stated that his work makes use of the image in a way that adheres to norms of artistic practice and was in line with the publisher's intent.[26][27][lower-alpha 2]
In 2001, Brady moved to Los Angeles, where she met English photographer Nick Brandt, whom she married in December 2002 in the Chyulu Hills of Kenya. A Georgian flat is her Dublin home when in the city.[29] She has discussed in interviews that she originally left Ireland as she found it "a repressive place to be a woman" at the time, with little opportunity.[2][5] The 2015 marriage equality and 2018 abortion referendums, as well as the expanding Irish industry, changed her mind, making her realise "Oh, this is a different Ireland and it accepts me now."[4] Brady had a "Catholic upbringing", but as of 2002 considered herself an atheist.[30]
↑ This publication is: Illustrator's Figure Reference Manual. London: Bloomsbury. 1987 ISBN978-0-74750-008-7.[25]
↑ The Guardian article attributes the source of certain figures in Vettriano's paintings to the Illustrator's Manual, but it does not mention Brady as the model for the manual's illustration.[27] The news item on the Jack Vettriano Website does explicitly name Brady as the model photographed in the dancing couple reference illustration, used by Vettriano as the source for the figures in his The Singing Butler, and other paintings,[26] as does The Courier of Dundee's summary of Brady's 2008 Daily Mirror interview.[24]
Related Research Articles
Brenda Fricker is an Irish actress, whose career has spanned six decades on stage and screen. She has appeared in more than 30 films and television roles. In 1990, she became the first Irish actress to win an Academy Award, earning the award for Best Supporting Actress for the biopic My Left Foot (1989). She also appeared in films such as The Field (1990), Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992), So I Married an Axe Murderer (1993), Angels in the Outfield (1994), A Time to Kill (1996), Veronica Guerin (2003), Inside I'm Dancing (2004) and Albert Nobbs (2011).
Dervla Kirwan is an Irish actress. She has received a number of accolades, including two IFTA Awards for her performances in the film Ondine (2009) and the RTÉ thriller series Smother (2021–2023) respectively.
Lorraine Pilkington is an Irish actress from Dublin who is best known for her roles as Katrina Finlay from Monarch of the Glen and Lulu in Human Traffic.
Anna Maria Manahan was an Irish stage, film and television actress.
The Singing Butler is a 1992 oil-on-canvas painting made by Scottish artist Jack Vettriano in 1992. It sold at auction in 2004 for £744,500 which was the record at the time for any Scottish painting, and for any painting ever sold in Scotland. Reproductions of The Singing Butler make it the best-selling art print in the UK.
Victoria Smurfit is an Irish actress. She is known for playing Orla O'Connell in the BBC television series Ballykissangel, Detective Chief Inspector Roisin Connor in the ITV police procedural Trial & Retribution and Cruella de Vil in Once Upon a Time for which she was nominated as Best Supporting Actress in 13th IFTA Film & Drama Awards in 2016.
Rita Gemma Craven is an Irish actress. She is best known for her role as Joan Parker, the frigid wife of Arthur, in the BBC TV drama Pennies From Heaven (1978).
Ruth Negga is an Irish actress known for her roles in the AMC television series Preacher (2016–2019) and the film Loving (2016). For her portrayal of Mildred Loving in the latter, Negga received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress. For her Broadway debut as Lady Macbeth in a production of Shakespeare's Macbeth in 2022, she earned a nomination for the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play.
Bríd Brennan is an Irish actress who is known for her film, TV and theatre work. She originated the role of Agnes in the Brian Friel play Dancing at Lughnasa, for which she won the 1992 Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play. She is also a three-time Olivier Award nominee; for Rutherford and Son (1995), The Little Foxes (2002) and The Ferryman (2018).
Jessie Buckley is an Irish actress and singer. The accolades she has received include a Laurence Olivier Award, and nominations for an Academy Award and three BAFTA Awards.
Mary McGuckian is a film director, producer and screenwriter from Northern Ireland. Her work includes The Midnight Court, Words Upon the Window Pane (1994), This Is the Sea (1996), Best (1999), The Bridge of San Luis Rey (2001), Rag Tale (2004), Intervention (2007), Inconceivable (2008), Man on the Train (2010), The Price of Desire (2015), and A Girl from Mogadishu (2018).
Charlene Lee McKenna is an Irish actress. She became a household name in Ireland after starring as Jennifer Jackson in the miniseries Pure Mule (2005). She appeared on Irish television in Single-Handed 2 (2008), Whistleblower (2008), and Raw (2008–2013). For Raw, she won Best Actress (Television) at the Irish Film & Television Awards, and for Whistleblower, she won Outstanding Actress in a Mini-Series at the Monte Carlo Television Festival.
Deirdre Donnelly is an Irish actress, based in Dublin who works in television, films and theatre.
Words Upon the Window Pane is a 1994 Irish drama film directed by Mary McGuckian and starring Geraldine Chaplin, Ian Richardson, and Jim Sheridan. McGuckian directorial debut, it is based on William Butler Yeats' one-act play of the same name. Pat O'Connor was billed to direct the project but he personally offered McGuckian, who was writing the screenplay at the time, the opportunity to also direct. The film received its US premiere on 10 June 1994 at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts as part of the largest retrospective of Irish film ever shown outside Ireland. In September that year, the film was screened at the 51st Venice International Film Festival.
Aisling Franciosi is an Irish actress. She won an AACTA Award for her leading role in the film The Nightingale (2018). On television, she is known for her roles in the RTÉ-BBC Two crime drama The Fall (2013–2016), season 2 of the TNT series Legends (2015), and the BBC One miniseries Black Narcissus (2020).
Louisa Clare Harland is an Irish actress. She is known for her roles as Orla McCool in the Channel 4 sitcom Derry Girls (2018–2022) and the titular character of the Disney+ series Renegade Nell (2024).
Danielle Galligan is an Irish actress, theatre maker, and poet. On television, she is known for her roles in the Netflix series Shadow and Bone (2021–2023) and the RTÉ series Obituary (2023). Her films include Lakelands (2022).
The Price of Desire is a 2015 Belgian-Irish biographical drama film directed by Mary McGuckian.
Siobhán Kate Cullen is an Irish actress. She began her career as a child actress, making her debut in Marina Carr's By the Bog of Cats (1998) at the Abbey Theatre. She landed her first major screen role in Eoin Macken's horror film The Inside (2012).
Alison Oliver is an Irish actress. She is known for her debut role as Frances in the BBC Three and Hulu miniseries Conversations with Friends (2022), and she was named in Variety's "10 actors to watch" in 2023.
1 2 Brady, Tara (30 May 2016). "Orla Brady: from Dublin to Hollywood to kicking ass in the Badlands". The Irish Times. Retrieved 1 May 2023. Sure, Brady was already well-travelled: she had trained in performing arts at Marcel Marceau's École Internationale de Mimodrame de Paris and later at the L'École Philippe Gaulier in Paris.
1 2 Brown, Kate (7 February 2023). "The scandal and success behind Fife artist Jack Vettriano's The Singing Butler". The Courier. Orla later told Mail Online: 'I didn't know about the picture's existence until someone asked me about it a few years ago. As soon as I saw it, it was obvious it was me. I didn't find it weird. The book was designed for artists who couldn't afford life models – and he'd used it as it was intended.'
↑ Hince, Peter (1987). Illustrator's Figure Reference Manual. Contributions by Mick Dunn, Dick Hatfield; photography by Peter Hince. London: Bloomsbury. ISBN978-0-74750-008-7. OCLC18256305.
↑ Allen Smith, Warren (2002). Celebrities in Hell: A Guide to Hollywood's Atheists, Agnostics, Skeptics, Free Thinkers, and More. Barricade Books Inc. p.130. ISBN1-56980-214-9. Brady had a Catholic upbringing but now considers herself an atheist
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
