Killing Eve’s Fiona Shaw’s highs and lows from the death of her brother to world stardom
PICKING up her Bafta for best supporting actress last month, Fiona Shaw said her award-winning role in Killing Eve was “probably the greatest pleasure of my life”.
For a 60-year-old veteran of the stage, small and big screen, whose career has included roles in the Harry Potter films and TV series Fleabag, it was quite the endorsement.
But for fans of Killing Eve, which returned to BBC One on Saturday night with 4million viewers — and no doubt thousands more on iPlayer where the full season has dropped — it is not hard to see why.
While Jodie Comer, as sassy assassin Villanelle, may hog the headlines, it is Shaw’s spymaster Carolyn Martens who often steals the scene.
New head writer Emerald Fennell must know this too. Saturday night’s opener crammed in more of Martens than ever before.
On first impressions she was a serious, buttoned-up boss but it became clear she had a mysterious, dangerous and playful side.
Anyone meeting Fiona would be forgiven for making the same misjudgment about the well-spoken, sensibly dressed Irish actress.
Openly gay, Fiona has had relationships with work colleagues, including Deep Blue Sea star Saffron Burrows, but five years ago met Boxing Day tsunami survivor Sonali Deraniyagala and knew she wanted to be with her.
The actress was totally taken by the vitality of this woman who had lost her husband, two children and parents in the 2004 disaster.
Fiona said: “Very quickly I thought, I just want to live with this person — and it’s been one of the most marvellous things to happen but it was also highly unlikely.
“Thankfully, she thought the same and it’s been a beautiful thing to happen at this stage of my life.”
Sonali, 55, and Fiona wed last year and the actress admits that eyebrows were “more than raised” at home in Cork over her marrying a woman, but said her mother “was very good about it”.
That might sound surprising for a 93-year-old devout-Catholic mum, but there is much about the Shaw story which confounds convention.
Brought up in the wealthy suburb of Montenotte, her mum was a physicist and her dad was an ophthalmic surgeon who expected his children to stay at home to study rather than go out and have fun.
Fiona has said: “He was very, very strict. We were terrified of him. He wasn’t abusive. Knowledge, history and rugby were the three big themes in our house. But he was unbending.
"His big complaint was that I was either out or sick. My mother was a party girl, so they were very different people.”
Both of Fiona’s parents disapproved of her acting dreams, with her dad only agreeing to fund a drama course if she went to university first. This motivated her, so having passed a philosophy degree, she was allowed to study acting at the leading Rada school in London.
She joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in her mid-20s where life was “at its zenith” until one of her younger brothers was killed in a car crash. Fiona said: “When Peter died, it stopped me. I was just having my debut at the RSC. It was devastating.”
When Fiona returned to the stage, she switched from comedic roles that had been her forte to more serious parts. The intense grief had inspired her to express her deepest emotions in front of audiences.
Her first major movie role was playing the carer of Daniel Day-Lewis’s disabled artist Christy Brown in the Oscar-nominated My Left Foot in 1989, quickly followed by Mountains Of The Moon where she had a sex scene and once said: “Oh, God! I couldn’t have been more naked . . . My mother hasn’t seen it yet, thank God. I can hear her now, ‘They’re our genes on display, like a common meat rack’.”
But Fiona is not a fan of her performance alongside Tom Selleck in the 1990 hit Three Men And A Little Lady, playing a love-starved headmistress. She said: “[That role] completely ruined my career as anything viable as a heroine. I was a clown.”
For the next couple of decades Fiona preferred the theatre to cinema but her career recovered with her role in Harry Potter, which made her a recognisable face across the globe as Harry’s Aunt Petunia.
After having dated stage director Deborah Warner and Saffron Burrows, Fiona found love again after reading Sonali’s moving book Wave, about losing her family in the tsunami and her struggle to cope.
She met the author at a book club meeting where she was speaking.
Fiona said: “I was so surprised that she was that person, not the person in the book. We spent half an hour chatting. When I left I thought, ‘I have just met life’.”
The actress now splits her time between her home in North London and New York, where her wife is a scholar at Columbia University, and is enjoying the success of Killing Eve — the first series of which was produced by Fleabag’s Phoebe Waller-Bridge.
Fiona says: “Phoebe reminds me of when I was 32 and doing very serious theatre. I see Phoebe enjoying every minute of her world. To watch her glorying in it makes me feel maternal. She’s having her moment — working so hard but relishing it and being radiant.”
And as Fiona’s profile increases with the second season under way, so do endless requests for spoilers.
Fiona says: “I can’t cross the street without people shouting out at me. They all have their theories.”
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