Irish actress and director Fiona Shaw was BOTD in 1958. Born Fiona Wilson in Cobh, County Cork to a middle-class family, she studied philosophy at University College Cork, moving to London to attend the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She made her professional stage debut in 1982 at the Royal National Theatre, and developed a distinguished career in classical repertoire, winning an Olivier Award for a trifecta of roles in Elektra, As You Like It and The Good Person of Szechwan and again in 1994 for Stephen Daldry‘s revival of Machinal. She made her Broadway debut in a 1994 revival of Medea, earning a Tony nomination. She became more widely known for her collaborations with her then-partner, director Deborah Warner, playing the title role in Shakespeare‘s Richard II, performing solo recitals of T. S. Eliot‘s poem The Waste Land and Samuel Coleridge Taylor’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and a revival of Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children. A relatively late starter to film, she appeared in My Left Foot, the Richard Francis Burton biopic Mountains of the Moon, Persuasion and Franco Zeffirelli‘s Jane Eyre, before finding international fame as a witch in Alan Ball‘s vampire TV series True Blood, and the vicious Aunt Petunia in the Harry Potter movie franchise. She returned to the theatre for a celebrated revival of Beckett’s Happy Days and The Testament of Mary, based on Colm Tóibín‘s revisionist portrait of Jesus‘ mother. She has also directed a series of opera productions, including Tchaikovsky‘s Eugene Onegin, Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro and Cherubini’s Medea. In 2018, she scored an impressive mid-career success as a charismatic secret agent in TV spy series Killing Eve, winning her a BAFTA Award. Shaw was married to Hugh Shaw, with whom she had two children, before coming out as a lesbian. In 2002, she had a highly-publicised relationship with actress Saffron Burrows, after co-starring in a stage adaptation of Jeanette Winterson‘s novel The PowerBook. She married her long-term partner Sonali Deraniyagala in 2018, with whom she is raising a child.