Kathryn Hunter

Her multifaceted career has spanned the big and small screen, but always comes back to the stage. In 2008, the Guardian wrote that her part in Beckett’s Fragments “crams into a few minutes of stage time more than most actors achieve in a career”. She has played Cleopatra, Lear’s Fool and Timon of Athens, all at the Royal Shakespeare Company, with Vanity Fair recently describing her as “one of the greatest actors alive”. In 2021, she played all three witches in Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, for which her husband filmed her being a crow in their kitchen for hours on end.

This role was just the latest that showed why she has so regularly been labelled as a shape-shifter. Sometimes that shape-shifting is literal: playing the witches demonstrated an extraordinary contortionist performance made possible thanks to three decades of yoga. Perhaps she earned that tag for the way she slides into a role full-bodied, as she did when playing Puck in New York in 2013, directed by Julie Taymor, where she turned the character into an impish, fairground spirit. Or it could be for her face: elastic, expansive, entirely malleable to play any age or gender. Or maybe it’s for her recognisable voice, rolled in gravel, booming and gentle in turn.

She admits to liking the description of a shape-shifter. It is what an actor should be, she believes, it is what they should do: transform “the shape of one’s body, the shape of one’s mind, the shape of one’s soul.”

The real world seemed more fun when one could inhabit these other pretend worlds

Hunter’s love for the “play and transformation” of acting began at school. “My friend Michelle Wade would lead me up to the top of the school and perform her audition pieces,” she remembers. “Somehow that pretend world often seemed more real than the real one, or the real one seemed more fun when one could inhabit these other pretend worlds.”

The discovery opened up an alternative life to her, one running alongside her own. “You’re secretly thinking this is more real than going to the bank and catching the bus,” she grins, “but you can do all that because there’s this other pretend world that really engages your interest, so you get through doing all the taxes and stuff like that – the boring bits.”

In 1981, Hunter graduated from RADA, having trained with the likes of Kenneth Branagh and John Sessions. While she was studying, she was in a horrific car crash, puncturing her lung and breaking her back. Much later, she revealed that it was an attempt at taking her own life, urging anyone in a similar position to “get help, get help, get help”.

As part of her recovery from her injuries, she took up yoga, which she happily found came naturally to her. “Over the past 10 years it’s become a sacred thing, where it’s a sort of spiritual practice as well.” As a director – she was for a time an associate director at the RSC and regularly directs for students – she had started doing yoga with her actors. Not wanting to teach bad alignment, she trained as a yoga teacher, and is now a self-described fanatic of the practice. “I started it before it became fashionable,” she says with a crackling smile. 

Her excitement and desire for the “pretend world” of acting has only strengthened with age, seeing every new film, series or stage show as another opportunity for exploration. “Each play and team of people are a different country,” she says, adding that she has no single process but rather a rough map and a sharpened pencil: “You go: ‘What’s the lie of the land here?’ and figure out a kind of toolkit for the journey.”

Exploring the male psyche

Today, Hunter thrives off discovery, and she seems to find it everywhere, all at once. She scrunches her face to every question, grappling carefully with each answer. “I love people who are brave, who are passionate. I admire discipline and exploration.” 

She points to director Peter Brook, who she has worked with over several decades. A few months ago, Brook, aged 97, Hunter, and Hunter’s husband Marcello Magni, got together for a production of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days. “He’s done a production with Winnie in the mound,” Hunter says, referencing the traditional way to stage Beckett’s existentialist play, “so he said: ‘This time, I want you at a table Kathryn, and Willie, rather than banished to the background, will be a little bit behind, reading the directions.’ It was a total revelation.”

Happy Days is thought of as a one-woman play, she says. This toying with the text revealed the relationship to be far more central than she had ever considered. “It’s borne out by the text, every other sentence: ‘What do you think, Willie’? It’s all in relation.” She shakes her head of wild hair. “There is Peter in his 90s forging on in terms of exploration. That is magnificent.”

Hunter’s husband Magni is one of her longest-term collaborators. They met in a tapas bar in Clapham and worked together for a long time at Complicité, which Magni co-founded with Simon McBurney. It was for Complicité’s 1989 production of Friedrich Durrenmatt’s The Visit, a story of a millionaire returned to rescue her hometown from poverty, that Hunter won her Olivier. “With Marcello and Simon and the whole company,” she says, “it was a kind of second training, to learn the storytelling possibilities of the body, both individually and collectively. That was a kind of landmark, a huge turning point for me.” McBurney once said that Hunter runs entirely on coffee and cigarettes. She admits smoking is still her worst habit.

The layers of sensitivity in a male psyche are astonishing

Magni played the Fool in the original production of Lear, and in the revival, he plays Kent, utterly loyal to the king. Their list of collaborations is long, but Hunter is quick to say: “The last two things we did were the best.” One was Happy Days with Brook. The other was Eugène Ionesco’s The Chairs at the Almeida, about an impossibly old couple entertaining themselves on a sinking island. “You have to find something that is very real,” she says of that particular, peculiar performance, “but on the borderline of clown, or a masked performance. It’s not commedia and it’s not ultra-realism. It kind of borders both countries. Because we’ve shared so much experience, it was wonderful to explore that together.” 

Her and Magni’s work stems from different types of performance, and she says they have learnt much from each other over the years. “I came from a more language-based training,” she says. “Marcello from [École Jacques] Lecoq, which was more based in the physical and spatial. It used to be: ‘You are a physical actor’ or ‘you are a text actor’ as if the two things are exclusive, and of course they go hand in hand.” She smiles wide again. “With Marcello, it is like in our relationship; I love the sea, he loves the mountains. He’s got me to love the mountains, I’ve got him to love the sea. I’ve seduced him into a love of words, and he’s seduced me into a love of playing and physical exploration.”

As she readies herself to perform as Lear once again, she notices how time has shifted her perceptions of the character, and of the play itself. “Obviously, the age is more present now,” she says, although her 65 is still far from Lear’s 80, “and the sense of loss. And it’s a world that has sort of lost its moral compass, not unlike ours. I’m feeling more and more that it is a sort of everyman’s journey.”

She is once again playing Lear as a man, but her understanding of a man’s mind has expanded since she last took on the role. “In terms of inherited tropes, it’s a patriarchal mindset,” she says, “but I was just talking with some of the young cast, and I suppose what I’ve noticed more over the years is the cliché that the man is more driven and hard-lined, fixed, I’ve discovered to be more and more wrong. The layers of sensitivity in a male psyche are astonishing. But that even with a more modern sensibility, which allows men not to have to be strong, there are still tropes that people seem to have to adhere to.”

Playing for real

Lear is just one of the leading Shakespearean roles she has played, having sat on a different throne at the Globe for an all-female Richard III, and in 2018 playing the title role in the RSC’s Timon of Athens, directed by Simon Godwin. Today, she won’t consider which other roles she’d like to take on in the future. “There is absolutely nothing on the horizon but this Lear,” she says adamantly. “That is such a huge canvas that I wouldn’t even dream of entertaining any thoughts about anything else. This,” she circles her hands, as if tracing the shape of the wooden O, “is all encompassing.”

With the same director, but largely new cast, Hunter calls the team “extraordinary”. She points in particular to the Globe’s artistic director Michelle Terry playing both Cordelia and the Fool. “We’re still in the middle of rehearsals but I must say, it’s a thrill. She’s still finding what it means to play that double, but I know just from being with her in rehearsal it’s incredibly powerful. I think her Fool-Cordelia, Cordelia-Fool will be something extraordinary.”

Whether this production will be a better Lear, or simply a different one, she doesn’t yet know. “The Globe, of course, will tell us how to play it,” she says. “At the moment it’s impossible to say. It’s like asking somebody who’s pregnant: ‘Is your child going to be sweet and intelligent and smiling and go to university and have a wonderful life?’” She laughs mischievously. “I don’t know. It’s still pregnant.”

She talks about the Globe with reverence; a performance here is not the same as on any other stage. “At the Globe we have a wonderful master of voice, Tess Dignan. She was saying that post-lockdown, actors were shouting too much. There is that sense of…” and here she yells “‘Oh my God, it’s open air,’ so we’re working with her on how to find the voice that is placed and natural, that will fill the space.” 

The other joy of the Globe, she says, is the audience. “We play on a very meta-theatrical level because everybody knows this is pretend. Of course, at the Globe on a sunny afternoon, it’s obvious we’re pretending to be in a storm. There’s no kind of fourth wall where I go into my little bubble of Stanislavskian preparation. You’re playing with the audience. You’re being totally in it, and we’re engaging in a theatrical game. It doesn’t mean the game is less powerful. It’s like when children say: ‘Let’s play hospitals or wizards.’ There’s a consciousness that it’s pretend, but nevertheless, it’s played very vividly and for real.”

“I think that’s the level of the Globe,” she adds, “We’re fiercely playing, and it doesn’t mean it’s less true because it’s pretend.” 

CV Kathryn Hunter
Born: 1957, New York
Training: RADA, 1981
Landmark productions
Theatre:
• The Visit, National Theatre 
Lyttelton, Young Vic (1991)
• Fragments, Young Vic (2008)
• Antony and Cleopatra, Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford, (2010)
• The Bee, Soho Theatre (2006 and 2012)
• A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Polonsky Shakespeare Center, New York (2013)
Film:
• The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021)
Awards: 
• Olivier award for best actress, The Visit, 1991
• New York Film Critics Circle award for best supporting actress, The Tragedy of Macbeth, 2021
Agent: Stanton Davidson Associates

King Lear runs at Shakespeare’s Globe, London, from June 10 to July 24. Visit shakespearesglobe.com for full details