Dame Siân Phillips(1933–)

Jane Elizabeth Ailwen Phillips was born at the Welsh-speaking mining village of Bettws in the upper Amman Valley of Glamorgan on 14 May 1933, only child of an anthracite miner and a primary-school teacher. The household spoke Welsh, and she was registered at the village school with Welsh as her first language.

She was schooled at Bettws and at Pontardawe Grammar School, and at eleven took the BBC Wales children's-radio post, presenting the Welsh-language Awr y Plant on the BBC Cardiff studio's open audition and running the daily broadcasts across the next six years.

She won a RADA scholarship at seventeen and took the Bancroft Gold Medal at her 1953 graduation. The repertory-theatre apprenticeship of the 1950s gave her the classical-stage foundation; she married the actor Peter O'Toole in 1959, a marriage of twenty years.

The Royal Shakespeare Company classical-leading-actress phase ran across the 1960s and 1970s: Lady Macbeth at Stratford in 1962, and Beatrice, Goneril opposite Paul Scofield's Lear, and the Egyptian queen across the RSC seasons. The breakthrough television role came at forty-three: Livia in the BBC's twelve-part I, Claudius (1976), the matriarchal-political figure of the Augustan-imperial setting, which won her the BAFTA Best Actress Television Award of 1977 and remains one of the female-acting performances of post-war British television.

The next four decades ran across Welsh-language and English-language stage and screen: the Reverend Mother Mohiam in David Lynch's Dune (1984), the National Theatre's Threepenny Opera (1987), and the one-woman Marlene (developed from 1996 and toured the West End and Broadway). She was created CBE in 2000 and DBE in 2016, and lives in west London. The Phillips name, the Christian patronymic of Philip, she carried in its Welsh-mining-village Welsh-first-language variant into the post-war British and Welsh classical-acting tradition.