A Birthday Conversation with Dame Siân Phillips

In Celebration of her 90th birthday, Dame Sian Phillips comes to the Tabard to discuss the highlights and thoughts about her career with renowned theatre director Richard Digby Day.

Siân Phillips was born and brought up in Wales. She won the National Eisteddfod at the age of 11 and started broadcasting the same year. She took a degree at the University of Wales and at the same time became an announcer and newsreader at the BBC and a leading member of the Arts Council’s company in an attempt to found a national theatre of Wales. She toured playing Welsh versions of Chekhov and new plays by Saunders Lewis. Subsequently she trained at RADA where she was awarded the Bancroft Gold Medal. Her many stage roles at the RSC, the National and in the West End have ranged from Shakespeare, Wilde and Shaw to new plays and musicals such as Pal Joey, Cabaret and A Little Night Music. She is a multiple Olivier, Tony and Drama Desk nominee and has been awarded Baftas for her television work and Lifetime Achievement awards for radio drama and Welsh television. Her acclaimed two part autobiography Private Faces and Public Places (Hodder) were published in 1999 and 2001 and by Faber in the US. She was made CBE and the DBE and is a Member of the Welsh Gorsedd of Bards of Great Britain.

Siân’s long career has included many films and television programmes, but she is perhaps best known for starring as Livia in the popular BBC adaptation of Robert Graves’s novel I, Claudius (BBC2, 1976) and for many appearances on the original run of Call My Bluff. She also appeared opposite her then-husband Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton in Becket (1964); as Ursula Mossbank in the musical film Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1969), again starring O’Toole; once more opposite O’Toole in Murphy’s War (1971); as Emmeline Pankhurst in the TV mini-series Shoulder to Shoulder (1974); as Clementine Churchill in Southern Television’s Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years (1981) starring Robert Hardy; as Lady Ann, the unfaithful wife of Alec Guinness’s character George Smiley, in the BBC1 espionage dramas Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1979) and Smiley’s People (1982).

The conversation will be about 60 minutes long with an opportunity for a Q&A with the audience afterwards.

This special one-off event is expected to be popular so book tickets early to get the best seats.