Fiona Shaw: ‘They didn’t think women were funny when I was young’

At night, Fiona Shaw dreams of Alan Rickman. “I can’t actually believe he’s dead. He sometimes just appears in my dreams,” she tells me, wistfully. “He was a natural leader, such a powerful presence in the world. Still is.” Shaw, who speaks at about a million miles a minute in a light Irish drawl, and is jovial and intellectually earnest in equal measure, was “very good friends” with Rickman. Both were at the Royal Shakespeare Company together in the 80s, running around with a wildly talented crowd that included Lindsay Duncan, Juliet Stevenson and Lesley Manville, and they were also both in the Harry Potter franchise. We’ll come back to their friendship, but the reason we’re talking about the late, award-winning screen and stage actor today, in a fittingly lavish library at a fancy London hotel, is because Rickman played Colonel Brandon in the celebrated Ang Lee-directed 1995 film of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, and Shaw is now playing Mrs Jennings in a new version directed by Georgia Oakley. It’s a very different sort of film from the 1995 adaptation – grittier and less glossy – and Shaw’s Mrs Jennings, the distant cousin who offers the newly impoverished Dashwood girls a cottage, is very different too. “I was surprised to be cast. Sometimes Mrs Jennings has been pushed to be someone very big – she’s very big in the book – but it is a very distinctive film and Georgia wanted it all pared back. I feel like I knew people like Mrs Jennings where I grew up” – in Montenotte, a suburb of Cork, Ireland. “In a smaller community, personalities are much bigger, and there’s also a performative element. Mrs Jennings is Mrs Jennings, a woman who doesn’t care about social status, and seems kind of foolish – in manner not intention, by the way. She’s actually incredibly benign. But she’s also performing Mrs Jennings.”In the new film of Jane Austen’s ‘Sense and Sensibility’, Fiona Shaw plays Mrs Jennings (Photo: Alex Bailey/Focus Features) Shaw is the kind of enormously prestigious stage actor whom not everyone will be able to name, but whose face everyone will almost certainly now recognise. Following a leap from stage to screen over the past few decades, it now feels like she’s basically in everything, and she has indeed had an enormously rich and varied career. After graduating from Rada in 1982, where she won the prestigious Bancroft Gold Medal (“I worked so hard – I absolutely loved it”), she went straight into the National Theatre for several years, followed by the RSC, where she took on major classical roles. She met Rickman, already an established stage presence, after he approached her outside following her performance in a play about Percy Shelley in Hampstead. “I came out one night and there was Alan. He said, ‘You’re very good,’ and I thought, ‘God, I can’t believe I’ve just met that man.’ He took a lot of people under his wing. He used to write us a lot of notes.” After Shaw joined the RSC, they became friends and performed together in Christopher Hampton’s hit play Les Liaisons Dangereuses with Lindsay Duncan, after which Rickman’s career went stratospheric. “It was a wonderful season. We all hung out together all the time. We used to go for Sunday lunch in these little villages and talk about theatre and language. It was a secondary education, basically.” Shaw had done a degree in philosophy before Rada, and one can easily imagine her at these lunches, or indeed pursuing an entirely different academic career – so eminently comfortable is she weaving in and out of erudite debate. She does also, by the way, love to laugh, at work and at home. Her pug-like snort as Mrs Jennings is quite something. “Oh, yes, I tried out a few laughs. Georgia brought it down a little.” What makes her laugh? “Oh, Irish people just laugh at themselves.” Shaw (left, with Sandra Oh) played an emotionally inscrutable MI6 agent in Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s ‘Killing Eve’ (Photo: Sid Gentle /BBC) In the 90s, Shaw won two Oliviers for roles that included her performance in Electra, As you Like It, and Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal at the National Theatre (she has a third Olivier for outstanding contribution to theatre). “You know, back then the theatre took up the front pages. It was a big deal when you opened a play. There was a kind of precipitous danger to doing a play and I loved that. I don’t think people now give a damn. Their emphasis is elsewhere.” Where? “On TikTok.” Shaw did some film work – in My Left Foot, for example (which won Daniel Day-Lewis his first Oscar), a part in Three Men and a Little Lady, and as Petunia Dursley in the Harry Potter series. But despite being told at the tender age of 28, by a casting agent in Hollywood, that she was “too old”, her screen career didn’t fully take off until 2018, with her Bafta-winning performance as an emotionally inscrutable MI6 agent in Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s surprise hit, Killing Eve. “I had lunch with Phoebe, who is a hoot, obviously, but, you know, I felt like John the Baptist, like I had seen the light, having met this burning bush of a person whose lightness of manner belies a connection to some deep seam of understanding everything. I watched episode one of Fleabag series two” – Shaw is also in that series, as an acerbic therapist, a guest role that won her an Emmy nomination – “and I thought, ‘This is the best half an hour of anything.’ It’s a masterpiece.” Since then, Shaw has appeared in Andor, True Detective, Enola Holmes, Bad Sisters and numerous films including Hot Milk, Echo Valley and Ladies First. She’s also appearing in another big upcoming Jane Austen adaptation: Netflix’s Pride and Prejudice, penned by Dolly Alderton, and starring Emma Corrin and Jack Lowden. Shaw plays Lady Catherine de Bourgh, the mean old aunt who doesn’t want Darcy to wed Lizzy Bennet, ostensibly the opposite to genial old Mrs Jennings. “Well yes, but they’re also similar, because they both say things so outrageous that they almost can’t be said, and yet they’re so believable. They never descend into cliché.” Playing Aunt Petunia in the ‘Harry Potter’ films allowed Shaw to work alongside her great friend, the late Alan Rickman (Photo: Murray Close /Warner Bros) Shaw always wanted to be an actor. Her father didn’t approve, so sent her off to University College Cork. “My dad thought I was throwing my life away and said, ‘You must go to university first.’ So, I studied pure philosophy because I wanted to do something that was of absolutely no use.” Actually, now it does seem of use, I say, for all these dense theatre texts, and, of course, for Austen. “Yes, that’s probably true. I have read and re-read Sense and Sensibility. I re-read it last week actually to prepare for these interviews.” Why do Austen and Brontë still get so much traction? “I do sometimes wonder if some people just like the glamour and the costumes and the parties. But Austen’s gift really is to cast a cold eye over life and death.” When Shaw was at the RSC, she noticed how few female directors there were and set up something called the “Women’s Group”, trying to draw more women into the company’s orbit. Does she feel like things have changed for female actors since those days? “It definitely has. So many women now don’t hit their stride until their late thirties, although that’s still much younger than men, who can hit it in their fifties. And also when I was young, they didn’t think a woman could be a headliner for a film, or even that women were funny. And that’s obviously been disproven 1,000 times over. Take Bridesmaids, which I saw three times. I couldn’t get over how much I loved it.” Would she call herself a feminist? “I’m not not a feminist,” she says in a mode that I find surprisingly coy given her history. “I’m all for equal rights. I… I don’t know what feminism is now. In the early 80s, I read every feminist text ever, but… I think now history is the monster, not the gender. Child mortality has gone down. The greatest indicator of future success is the education of the mother. These are the real issues about women, not whether we can wear miniskirts or not.” Shaw now lives in north London with her wife of eight years, economist Sonali Deraniyagala. Her father has passed away but she still returns to Ireland to see her mother and siblings. Does she still feel Irish? “No, no, I don’t feel Irish, I don’t feel anything like that because I’m out of the… I read the Irish Times every day though.” Georgia Oakley, whose excellent 2022 feature film debut Blue Jean is about a gay PE teacher in Thatcherite Britain, has talked a lot about feeling like an outsider, and you can see her interest in that too in Sense and Sensibility, where the Dashwood girls are cast aside for being too poor, for being women or even feel othered by each other for behaving too emotionally, or indeed, insufficiently so. Does Shaw ever feel like an outsider? It’s the one moment of our hour together where she pauses. “No, no, actually hang on… I’m thinking about it… Now you’ve got me. I’ll probably worry about this a little bit. The thing is, I’ve always been lucky to do what I wanted with my life. Not to be smug, but I do think that’s the most privileged thing. So, no. I don’t think I have felt like an outsider. I’ve just always felt like myself.” ‘Sense and Sensibility’ is in cinemas now