Dame Siân Phillips(1933–)

Jane Elizabeth Ailwen Phillips was born on 14 May 1933 at the small terrace house at 6 Forge Road in the Welsh-speaking mining village of Bettws (more recently officially Betws-y-Coed), in the upper Amman Valley of Glamorgan, only child of David Phillips, an anthracite coal miner at the Cwm-gors colliery, and Sally Thomas, a primary-school teacher. The household was lower-working-class Welsh-speaking Welsh-Nonconformist of the inter-war Amman Valley generation: the family lived in the two-up two-down miner's terrace, the parents spoke Welsh as the household language and English as the public-school-and-shop-language, and the daughter was registered at the Bettws primary school in 1938 with Welsh as her first language.

She was schooled at the Bettws Primary School from five and at the Pontardawe Grammar School from eleven. The small BBC Wales children's-radio post came at eleven in 1944 through the Pontardawe Grammar School recommendation: the BBC Cardiff regional studio was producing the daily children's-radio programme *Awr y Plant* (the *Children's Hour* Welsh-language equivalent) and was running the open-audition process for the Welsh-speaking child presenters that the wartime-and-post-war broadcasting establishment required. She took the audition, was hired on the ten-shillings-a-broadcast performance-fee, and ran the daily Welsh-language children's-radio broadcasting work across the next six years to her small school-leaving examinations of 1950.

She took the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) scholarship at seventeen in 1950, moved to the Bayswater bedsitting room that the RADA scholarship paid for, and took the Bancroft Gold Medal at the RADA final-year graduation examination of 1953. She was twenty. The small repertory-theatre apprenticeship of the post-RADA Bristol-and-Birmingham-and-Sheffield small touring-theatre period of the 1950s gave her the classical-stage technical foundation that the subsequent career was built on; she married the Welsh-character actor Peter O'Toole at the Dublin register office in 1959 (the one of two marriages of her adult life; they were divorced in 1979 after twenty years and the custody-of-the-two-daughters dispute that ran through the post-1979 period was the substantial public-personal-difficulty of her career).

The senior small Royal Shakespeare Company stage-classical-leading-actress phase of her career ran across the 1960s and 1970s. She played Lady Macbeth at the Stratford Royal Shakespeare Theatre in 1962 at twenty-nine alongside Eric Porter's Macbeth, took the lead role of Eliza Doolittle in the post-Pygmalion Liverpool-Playhouse 1962 revival, and across the Royal Shakespeare Company seasons of 1964 and 1965 played the leading-female-Shakespeare-roles (Beatrice in *Much Ado About Nothing*, Goneril in *King Lear* opposite Paul Scofield's Lear, the Egyptian Queen in *Antony and Cleopatra*). The senior small breakthrough television role came at the BBC Television Centre studio in 1976 when she was forty-three: the Livia of the BBC television adaptation of Robert Graves's *I, Claudius* (the twelve-part Sunday-evening BBC Two adaptation of the Graves novels of 1934 and 1935, transmitted on the BBC Two from 20 September to 6 December 1976) ran across the twelve episodes as the matriarchal-political-poisoner of the Augustan-imperial Roman-court-political setting of the Graves source novels. The small Livia performance won the Best Actress BAFTA Television Award of 1977 and remains, by the senior post-1976 television-historical-criticism consensus, one of the female-acting performances of the post-war British-television history.

The next four decades of her career ran across the Welsh-language and English-language stage, screen and television work continuously to the present day. The senior small post-*I, Claudius* roles included the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam in David Lynch's *Dune* (1984), the Polly Peachum in the National Theatre 1987 revival of Brecht's *The Threepenny Opera* (the Hytner-directed National Theatre revival that ran across 1987), the Marlene Dietrich in *Marlene* (the Pam Gems one-woman play that she developed across 1996 and toured across the West End and Broadway across 1996 to 1999), and the Lady Macduff in the 2002 BBC Wales radio production of the Macbeth Welsh-language adaptation. She continued working through her late seventies and eighties on the stage-classical-and-television register, was created CBE in 2000 and DBE in the 2016 New Year Honours, and lives in west London. The Phillips name in the English-side catalogue is the patronymic of Philip (from the Greek *Philippos*, lover of horses, the Christian-baptismal patronymic carried into post-Conquest English baptismal naming through the medieval Saint-Philip apostolic-cult tradition); she carried the Welsh-mining-village-Welsh-first-language variant of it into the post-war British-and-Welsh classical-acting tradition.