Dame Siân Phillips

Film

Theatre

TV

Radio

Miss Phillips has made countless radio broadcasts in major roles of a variety of plays, including: PERICLES, BEQUEST TO THE NATION, SKIRMISHES, ANTHONY AND CLEOPATRA, ALL’S WELL THAT END’S WELL, THE MAIDS, OEDIPUS REX, PHEDRE,etc.

Her many speaking book recordings include: THE TAMING OF THE SHREW, MEASURE FOR MEASURE, AN OMLETTE AND A GLASS OF WINE, THE CAMOMILE LAWN.

Her musical recordings include: PAL JOEY, GIGI, MARLENE, A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC (two versions), AND SO IT GOES(to be released), BENITCHED(single).

Awards

Reviews

LES BLANCS
“And there are fine, alert contributions from…glorious Siân Phillips as the surviving spirit of the mission.” - Michael Coveney (www.whatsonstage.com)

PLAYING FOR TIME

“Fénelon is depicted by the outstanding Siân Phillips as a frail, fallible figure surrounded by the youthful women of her remembrance.

It’s hard to pay sufficient tribute to an actor in her 80s prepared to be so physically and psychologically abused. Nor does it matter that Phillips rasps through selections from Madam Butterfly practically in a baritone register, as Fénelon couldn’t sing Puccini properly either. And the tension in her throat suggests the effects of agonised complicity with the camp commanders, who commend the orchestra for “strengthening us in this difficult work of ours”. - Alfred Hickling (The Guardian)

“A superb production led by Sian Phillips’ devastatingly honest central performance. Magnificently melancholic as Fania, with her head shaven and looking all skin and bone, Sian Phillips gives a peerless portrayal of a woman looking back in wonder while still wrestling with the existential lunacy of collaboration through music, her formidable acting technique and sure theatrical instincts invisibly linking remembrance of horrors past with our own troubled times.

At the end, when Fania and two other survivors meet in a restaurant, her request to a waiter is for “something absolutely extraordinary”. But Phillips and the ensemble have already delivered it.” - Roger Foss (THE STAGE)

“Hard to overstate the impact, the sense of event, commemoration and bleak grandeur in this extraordinary evening. But add to that a central performance as Fania from Sian Phillips: eighty-one now, a war-baby with early memories of being taken outside at night to watch Swansea burning. We use some words too lightly in the arts, but Phillips’ wholly committed gently controlled performance is a marvel of fearlessness, sorrow and sincerity. It is one of those rare memorable nights when you come to believe you are not watching acting at all, but remembered experience: a necessary ritual. Sian Phillips is the powerful centre.” - Libby Purves (Theatre Cat)

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST

“Phillips is one of the best Lady Bracknells I have ever seen; skirting caricature without embracing it, she encapsulates the low venality of the high born.” - Neil Norman (The Daily Express)

“Lady Bracknell, that gorgon of social propriety, is embodied by the redoubtable Sian Phillips, who is 81. She looks more glamorous than any Lady Bracknell has a right to, but any occasion to gaze upon Ms. Phillips’s bone structure is not to be discounted.” - Ben Brantley (New York Times)

“Phillips is one of the best Lady Bracknells I have ever seen; skirting caricature without embracing it, she encapsulates the low venality of the high born.”
- Neil Norman (Daily Express)

“Sian Phillips’s stately Lavinia apprehensively practices the line “A handbag?”.  She has no need worry; she carries off the part of Lady Bracknell with imperious aplomb.” - Paul Taylor (The Independent)

“Siân Phillips is much more than that, capturing not only Lady Bracknell’s corseted hauteur but also her mercenary nature, as she avidly sizes up Cecily’s financial potential.” - Michel Billington (The Guardian)

“Siân Phillips as a vulture-like Lady Bracknell whose voice swoops and soars to tremendous effect.” - Charles Spencer (The Daily Telegraph)

“Phillips is, meanwhile, pure arsenic in old lace as Lady Bracknell and she delivers the play’s most celebrated line – “a handbag!” – with tremendous relish.”
- Tim Walker (Sunday Telegraph)

“Phillips admirably conveying the calculating little mind behind Lady Bracknell’s stentorian pronouncements.” - Sarah Hemming (Financial Times)

“Special mention has to be given to Sian Phillips who plays a fantastically spiky Lady Bracknell. In fact, Phillips is so brilliant at the role that you can imagine her in one of the original casts, except for when she breaks character to tell her husband to straighten up.” - Joanne Byrne (The Upcoming)

“Otherwise there’s plenty of mounting hysteria – Phillips is consummate at sewing in a more or less throwaway “handbag”, which we’ve seen Lavinia rehearse near the start, within a crescendo of growing horror at Jack’s railway-station narrative. Flawless.” - Tim Nice (The Arts Desk)

“Siân Phillips is an exquisite Lady Bracknell, the veteran performer on scintillating form as she delivers quotable line after quotable line of Wilde’s words to comic perfection.” - Matthew Amer (Official London Theatre)

PEOPLE
“Sian Phillips is superb as Dorothy Stacpoole. the impoverished elderly aristocrat and former model who has inherited a crumbling South Yorkshire pile, her lifelong home which she fears she’ll be forced to turn over to cagoule-wearing, camera-clutching hordes of National Trust day trippers. With her razor cheekbones, wasp waist and cool hauteur, Phillips is the epitome of dilapidated elegence.” - Sam Marlowe (The Times)

THIS IS MY FAMILY
“And Granny May, infinitely touching, is the great Sian Phillips.” - Libby Purves (The Times)

“Best of all is the venerable May, played by the peerless Siân Phillips, who combines religious conviction with erotic memories.” - Michael Billington (The Guardian)

CABARET
“Indeed the relationship between the old landlady, Fraulein Schneider, and her Jewish admirer Herr Schultz proves far more touching thanks to lovely autumnal performances from Sian Phillips and Linal Haf” - Charles Spencer (The Daily Telegraph)

“The show is still worth seeing for its bold imaginative sweep and for Sian Phillips’s deeply touching Fraulein Schneider” - Paul Taylor (The Independent)

“Siân Phillips is on typically scene-stealing form as Fräulein Schneider” - Tim Walker (The Sunday Telegraph)

LITTLE DOGS (National Theatre of Wales / Frantic Assembly)

“Good as everything and everyone else is, it is Phillips who commands the show – and this is the greatest strength of the conception of the piece. Her understated presence counterbalances the wild exuberances of the teenage characters that surround her. By reminding us that youth is a thing that does not last, she induces in us a Thomas-like compassion for this turbulence of teenage self-obsession.” - Clare Brennan (The Observer)

“Siân Phillips, whose grandmotherly figure presides over many of the scenes with a benign but saddened presence, gives a wonderfully strident monologue at the play’s finale.” - Dylan Moore (The Arts Desk)

“Quieter moments, back in that sitting room, or at a rain-soaked bus-stop, reveal the anxious, lonely reality beyond the displays of sexual bravado. Despite the hugely watchable Phillips appearing in these, and stealing the show in a jaw-dropping finale, there remains a nagging sense of disjunction between the two worlds” - Elisabeth Mahoney (The Guardian)

LOVESONG
“Phillips is mesmerising as a woman facing up to her inevitable demise.” - Karen Price (Western Mail)

“What this beautiful 90-minute show has in glorious quantities, though, is skill and richness in theatrical presentation; in the poetry of Morgan’s text, in the powerful use of video and sound, and above all in Siân Phillips’s stunning central performance as Maggie…” - Joyce McMillan (The Scotsman)

Stats

Literary Agent: Mark Lucas (Law Ltd)
Training: RADA (Bancroft Medal)

Eyes: Blue   
Hair: Fair   
Height: 5'8"