Eleanor of Aquitaine

I have been blessed with an amazing gift today.  I have been cast as Eleanor of Aquitaine in The Lion in Winter.  She is a fantastic, acerbic, witty, complex character.  Katharine Hepburn won an Academy Award for playing her.  The play is phenomenal, the movie is incomparable, but even more than that, Eleanor of Aquitaine was an extraordinary woman who went off to fight in a crusade, married two different kings of two different countries, and was the mother of Richard the Lionheart as well as King John.  She was a woman ahead of her time, and I can't wait to play her.  I'm going to have to play older than I ever have, except for high school when there's no one older to play those roles anyway.  Eleanor is supposed to be 60 at the time of the play.  That's going to be a challenge in itself.  I've never worked with this company or this director, so I can't wait to learn from him.  He's also playing Henry, so we'll have a lot to establish together.  The show is scheduled to go up the last weekend of November.

I'm going to try to stay away from the Katharine Hepburn version to try and find my own Eleanor, but here she is for you all to enjoy...