Great news from the wires  this week, not only can we look forward to a new production of The Importance of Being Earnest in Dublin’s Gaiety Theatre this summer, but the role of Lady Bracknell will be played by the wonderful Stockard Channing!

Always a fan, my admiration was sealed forever when I discovered that her television debut was on Sesame Street (featuring in four sketches of The Number Painter, she was, in turn, the lady at the picnic; the woman holding the umbrella; the woman inside the elevator having her plastic handbag painted on; and finally, the nurse saying “Next” to her patients!).  Outstanding!  Moving on from The Street, she landed the role of teenage bad girl Betty Rizzo in Grease when she was 33 years old.  She leads the Pink Ladies clique, jumps around at a sleepover, does bold things with boys in the back of cars and then sings all about it.

After a quiet spell in the 1980’s, she won an Obie award for her stage performance in Six Degrees of Separation, and then reprised her lead role as an Upper East Side matron in the film version.  She was nominated for both an Oscar and a Golden Globe Award for her efforts.  This is her, along with Will Smith, Anthony Michael Hall, Heather Graham (somewhere in there) and everybody’s favourite Canadian, Donald Sutherland.

You may also remember her from… a whole load of other stuff, as some of her most memorable roles have been in LGBT themed films.   She played the battered wife who gets a physical and emotional make-over from drag queen Patrick Swayze in To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar and the mother of a teenager coming to terms with her sexuality in The Truth About Jane. 2002 saw her win the Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Miniseries or a Movie Emmy for her role in the true-life TV-movie The Matthew Shepard Story, playing Judy Shepard, the bereaved mother of the college student who was tortured and murdered in Wyoming in 1998, targeted specifically by his attackers because he was gay.  She also received a Screen Actors Guild award for the role.

The role she is probably most renowned for is as Abbey Bartlet, First Lady to Martin Sheen’s President in the NBC drama The West Wing, which ran for seven award-filled seasons.  She herself picked up an Emmy in 2002 after becoming a cast regular, and stealing some of the best scenes.

And as if all that wasn’t enough, she also narrated later seasons of Meerkat Manor!

See y’all at the Gaiety!

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