Jane Elizabeth Marie Lapotaire (née Burgess; 26 December 1944) is an English actress from Suffolk.

Biography

Lapotaire was born in Ipswich, Suffolk, the daughter of Louise Elise (Burgess). Her stepfather, Yves Lapotaire, worked in the oil industry and was originally from Quebec, Canada. From the age of two months, she was raised as a foster child by an old-age pensioner, Grace Chisnell (Granny Grace), who was also the foster mother of Lapotaire's own biological mother, a French orphan, who was abandoned in England. When Lapotaire was about 12, her biological mother made a bid to get her back. The child welfare department of the Suffolk County Council intervened and decided that the mother had this right. Lapotaire chose to be with Granny Grace, but lived with her biological mother and stepfather, who worked in various French oil companies in North Africa (particularly Libya), three times a year. She also adopted their family name. The Lapotaires in North Africa were Francophones, and like French colonials at that time, lived around the French embassy. Granny Grace died in 1984 aged 96 and Louise Burgess died in 1999. She studied at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School from 1961 to 1963, the programme was a two-year course at that time, unlike the three-year course today. She had earlier auditioned for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, but failed to get in. She joined the Bristol Old Vic theatre company in 1965. She joined the National Theatre in 1967, was a founding member of The Young Vic Theatre in 1970/1971, and moved to the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1974. Her performance in the title role of Marie Curie (1977) first brought her to wide attention. In 1978, she performed the title role Édith Piaf for Pam Gems's play Piaf, directed by Howard Davies for the Royal Shakespeare Company, in Stratford-upon-Avon and in London at the Warehouse Theatre, Covent Garden in 1979. Two years later, the show moved to Broadway. Lapotaire won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play that year. She was married to director Roland Joffé from 1974 to 1980; they had one son, screenwriter and director Rowan Joffé (born 1973). Following their divorce, she was for a time the partner of actor Michael Pennington. She returned to the Royal Shakespeare Company in October–November 2013 as the Duchess of Gloucester in Gregory Doran's adaptation of Richard II with David Tennant in the title role. This was followed in October–December 2015 as Queen Isobel in Henry V. On Christmas Day in 2014, she appeared as Princess Irina Kuragin in season five, episode nine of Downton Abbey.

Writing

Lapotaire has written a number of memoirs: Grace and Favour (1989), Out of Order: A Haphazard Journey Through One Woman's Year (1999), and Everybody's Daughter, Nobody's Child (2007), which includes an account of her childhood growing up in Levington Road, Ipswich.

Illness

On 11 January 2000, while preparing to teach a course on Shakespeare at the Ecole Internationale in Paris, Lapotaire suffered a massive cerebral haemorrhage. Four days after her collapse, she underwent a six-hour surgery and spent the next three weeks largely unconscious. She writes about her recovery in Time Out of Mind.

Associations

Lapotaire is honorary president of the Bristol Old Vic Theatre Club, and is president of the Friends of Shakespeare's Globe.

Filmography

Theatre

Her stage credits include:

Radio

Awards

In April 2018, Lapotaire became the 29th recipient of the prestigious Pragnell Shakespeare Birthday Award and gave the 454th Shakespeare Birthday Lecture on 20 April 2018. ! scope="row" | 1978 ! scope="row" | 1989 ! scope="row" | 1981 ! scope="row" | 1983 ! scope="row" | 2020