Career
McTeer's television work includes the BBC production of Nigel Nicolson's book Portrait of a Marriage in which she played Vita Sackville-West and the popular ITV series The Governor written by Lynda La Plante. She made her screen debut in Half Moon Street, a 1986 film based on a novel by Paul Theroux. In 1991, she appeared in Catherine Cookson's The Black Velvet Gown, with Bob Peck and Geraldine Somerville; this won the International Emmy award for best drama. She appeared in the 1992 film version of Wuthering Heights (co-starring Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes) and the 1995 film Carrington (which starred Emma Thompson and Jonathan Pryce) as Vanessa Bell.
In 1996, McTeer garnered critical acclaim - and both the Laurence Olivier Theatre Award and Critics' Circle Theatre Award for her performance as Nora in a West End production of Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House. The following year, the production transferred to Broadway, and McTeer received a Tony Award, Theatre World Award, and Drama Desk Award as Best Actress in a Play.
During the show's run, McTeer was interviewed by Charlie Rose on his PBS talk show, where she was seen by American filmmaker Gavin O'Connor, who, at the time, was working on a screenplay about a single mother's cross-country wanderings with her pre-teen daughter. He was determined that she star in the film. When prospective backers balked at her relative anonymity in the States, he produced the movie himself. Tumbleweeds proved to be a 1999 Sundance Film Festival favourite, and McTeer's performance won her a Golden Globe as Best Actress and Academy Award and Screen Actors Guild nominations in the same category.
McTeer's screen credits include Songcatcher (with Aidan Quinn), Waking the Dead (with Billy Crudup and Jennifer Connelly), the dogme film The King is Alive (with Jennifer Jason Leigh), The Intended (with (Brenda Fricker and Olympia Dukakis), and Tideland, written and directed by Terry Gilliam. She also starred in the dramatisation of Mary Webb's Precious Bane. She has appeared in such British television serials as The Amazing Mrs Pritchard, Hunter, and Agatha Christie's Marple (episode: "The Murder at the Vicarage").
McTeer played Mary, Queen of Scots in Mary Stuart, a play by Friedrich Schiller in a new version by Peter Oswald, directed by Phyllida Lloyd. She acted opposite Harriet Walter as Queen Elizabeth I in London's West End in 2005, a role she reprised in the 2009 Broadway transfer of the production. McTeer received a Tony Award nomination for her role in Mary Stuart, and won the Drama Desk Award, Outstanding Actress in a Play.
Read more about this topic: Janet McTeer
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