Tara Fitzgerald brings comic timing and an unshowy ease to parts that have too often confined her to being the romantic interest. We value her most in company, though the writing does not always give her enough to do.
Fi1m perspective
In Brassed Off (1996), Tara Fitzgerald’s Gloria fits into the band’s company without making the ensemble feel like a supporting cast for her romance. Mark Herman gives these people lives beyond the music, and Fitzgerald is comfortably at home alongside Stephen Tompkinson, Jim Carter and Ewan McGregor. We enjoyed their company, and her unforced place within it made us want more time with the group. The romance between Gloria and McGregor’s Andy Barrow is less distinctive; its familiar demands sometimes take that time away.
Her early casting repeatedly put her in that position, with the romantic interest threatening to become the whole job. Her screen debut came in Hear My Song (1991), and Sirens (1994) cast her as Estella Campion. The latter makes use of her comic timing alongside the discovery of sexual freedom, a recurring concern in the parts she was offered. That humour gives her something more interesting to do than simply persuade us that someone might fall in love with her, and it deserves room in the writing.
The move towards mature character parts is evident in I Capture the Castle (2003), while television brought Eve Lockhart in Waking the Dead and Selyse Baratheon in Game of Thrones (2013–2015). Those roles make the early romantic-interest label look increasingly inadequate. The work became patchier after the 1990s, however, so this is not a career we would recommend indiscriminately. We would follow the particular part, rather than assume that a later date means better material.
For Brassed Off, Fitzgerald spent months learning the flugelhorn, a practical commitment that the romantic-interest label hardly accounts for. It is a useful detail because Herman’s film depends on the band feeling like people who have a life together, not actors waiting for their next line. Fitzgerald contributes to that feeling without upsetting the balance of the cast. Start there, and do not expect the courtship to be the main attraction.
Biography
Tara Fitzgerald is an English actress. She trained at the Drama Centre in London and made her film debut as Nancy Doyle in Hear My Song (1991). She played Gloria in Brassed Off (1996) and appeared in other films including The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain (1995) and Sirens (1994).
On stage, Fitzgerald won the New York Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Featured Actress in a Play in 1995 for playing Ophelia opposite Ralph Fiennes in Hamlet. She has taken leading roles in productions including Macbeth at Shakespeare’s Globe. On television she has played Selyse Baratheon in Game of Thrones (2014) and appeared in series such as Death in Paradise and Belgravia.
