Fairley says that the episode’s director David Nutter told her to play the scene “on a level” with her character’s nemesis, Walder Frey. In her stint on Game of Thrones, culminating in the terrifying scene known as the Red Wedding, Catelyn was also raw but standing tall, slitting the throat of her enemy’s wife, even though she knew that her violent actions would precipitate her own death. “Catelyn goes through the loss of her husband, the loss of her children and eventually makes the decision to kill herself because she thinks that there’s nothing left to live for - and they thought, because of the final scenes in Othello, that I could maybe achieve that for them.”Īt the end of Othello, Fairley’s Emilia was scrunched on the floor, raw and guttural, as she exposed her husband’s sins. “I think in retrospect needed somebody to go on an emotional journey,” she tells me. Now she’s returning to the same stage in a revival of Abi Morgan’s 2000 play Splendour. She was offered the part after the Game of Thrones writers saw her play Iago’s wife Emilia in Othello at the Donmar Warehouse in 2008. Along with Peter Dinklage’s scheming dwarf, hers has arguably been the series’ greatest performance. Fairley played her with light flashing from her eyes, as a maternal Boadicea. ![]() Proud parent to a clan depleted in the cruellest of ways, Catelyn is a towering figure. But Fairley, a Northern Ireland-born actress who has been based in London since 1986 - and given standout performances in everything from Oleanna at the Royal Court in 1993 to Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa at the Old Vic in 2009 - got rather freer rein in Westeros.įor three seasons she played Catelyn Stark, first wife, then widow of the leader of the North, Ned Stark. On the whole, even the higher profile actors from this side of the Atlantic have been given little more than extended cameos: Ciaran Hinds as Mance Rayder, an unkempt leader of a wild tribe, for example or David Bradley as a sadistic, ancient lord, Walder Frey. The hit fantasy series has displayed a rare knack for casting stalwarts of the London stage whose names scarcely register beyond the West End, and letting them loose to steal plum scenes of the bloody, blistering saga from under the noses of the mainly American ensemble. Of all the lesser-known actors upon whom Game of Thrones has endowed instant celebrity, Michelle Fairley may be the most deserving.
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