Orla Brady

Orla Brady (born 28 March 1961) is an Irish theatre, television, and film actress born in Dublin. She started her career as a touring theatre performer and began appeared regularly in television roles in the 1990s. She has been nominated for several awards from the Irish Film & Television Academy for her television work. Major or recurring TV roles continued in Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, with Brady appearing in over thirty series, limited series, or television movies up to the 2020s. This included her portrayal of two supporting characters in the CBS-Paramount+ series, Star Trek: Picard.

Brady's first role in film was in Words Upon the Window Pane in 1994. An early starring film role in the RTÉ-BBC co-production A Love Divided, won her the 1999 Golden Nymph Best Actress Award. Brady has since appeared in more than a dozen feature films and several short films, and was named in the 2020 list of Ireland's greatest film actors, published by The Irish Times.

Brady married in 2002 and lives in Los Angeles and Dublin.

Early life and education
Orla Brady was born in Dublin, the one of four children. At one time, her parents were the owners of an establishment called Oak Bar, in Temple Bar, Dublin. She lived in Bray, County Wicklow, Ireland, from birth until the age of seven. She was educated at a convent of the Ursulines in Cabinteely, Dublin.

Brady began training in performance in 1986, with a year in Paris; she studied at L'École Philippe Gaulier, and secured a place at Marcel Marceau's École Internationale de Mimodrame de Paris. As she spoke of the time in interview, "there was a lot of clowning around, buffoonery and fencing. It was then that my own style kind of blossomed."

Career
Brady began her career touring with Balloonatics Theatre Company, in productions of Hamlet and Finnegans Wake. Returning to Dublin after studying in Paris, she performed the role of Adela in House of Bernarda Alba in 1989 and Natasha in a 1990 production of Three Sisters, both at the Gate Theatre. After moving to London, she played Kate in Brian Friel's Philadelphia, Here I Come!, which later transferred from the King's Head Theatre to the West End. Brady performed as Ghislane in Stephen Poliakoff's Blinded by the Sun, staged at the Royal National Theatre in England in 1996.

Brady's first television role was a minor one as a bank clerk in the series Minder; her first film part followed in 1994 when she was cast as Vanessa in Words Upon the Window Pane.

Substantial roles have included the RTÉ-BBC co-production of A Love Divided, where she portrayed Sheila Cloney, a woman whose conflict with the Catholic Church over her child's education leads to an anti-Protestant boycott, a story based on real events in 1950s Fethard-on-Sea in County Wexford, for which she won the 1999 Golden Nymph Best Actress Award. She also played one of the four lead characters in the BBC drama series, Mistresses, portraying lawyer Siobhan Dillon. She has appeared in RTÉ's Proof, and had roles in films such as Words Upon the Window Pane (1994), The Luzhin Defence (2000), How About You (2007), and 32A (2007).

Since moving to California in 2001, Brady has also appeared in Family Law, where she played Naoise O'Niell, a series that ran for 3 years on CBS. She also starred in Nip/Tuck, a US drama about plastic surgeons (in which she played Dr. Jordan), and starred as Claire Stark in Shark (2008). In 2008, she appeared in "Firewall", the second episode of the BBC series Wallander. She also appeared as Meredith Gates, a fleecing art collector who herself is conned in the first series of the British series Hustle. Commencing in 2009, Brady portrayed Elizabeth Bishop, the wife of Walter Bishop and the mother of Peter Bishop in the Fox television series Fringe. In 2010, she played Catherine in the TV series The Deep, alongside James Nesbitt, and starred as Katie Dartmouth in the TV series Strike Back.

In 2012, she appeared in the ITV series Eternal Law as Mrs Sheringham, an angel who fell in love with a human and became mortal, and played Taryn in the Sky One series Sinbad. In late 2013, she appeared as the Countess Vera Rossakoff in the television adaptation of The Labours of Hercules, part of the final series of Agatha Christie's Poirot alongside David Suchet. Brady appeared in a special production in the BBC science-fiction series Doctor Who, the 25 December 2013 Christmas special, The Time of the Doctor (as the character Tasha Lem). In 2014, she filmed Banished, playing Anne Meredith.

In 2015, Brady appeared as architect Eileen Gray in Irish director Mary McGuckian's The Price of Desire, which was in festivals in 2016 (and found a digital distributor in 2020). From 2017 to 2019, she had a main role in the AMC martial arts drama series Into the Badlands as Lydia. Brady had a recurring role in a season of the American Horror Story franchise, portraying Dr. Hopple in American Horror Story: 1984, the ninth season of the FX horror anthology television series.

As of 2022, Brady has had a recurring role in the science fiction television series, Star Trek: Picard, as Laris, wife of the now-deceased Zhaban (Jamie McShane), the two being former members of the Romulan Tal Shiar and now, workers in the wine production and home of Picard at his Chateau.

Modelling images used in artwork
In the 1980s, while she was in her mid-20s, Brady modelled for an artists' guide publication. She recalled in 2008 that the studio shoot had paid about £50 for her day's work, at a time when she welcomed the income, with her acting career yet to take off. Photographed in a number of dancing poses, the resulting series of figure studies featuring Brady appeared in the Illustrator's Figure Reference Manual. More than 25 years later, it was noted that one of these images of Brady, posing as part of a dancing couple, was the basis of the main figures in a widely-known painting, The Singing Butler, by artist Jack Vettriano. As stated by Vettriano in 2013, Brady's image had "later inspired [his] most famous painting, The Singing Butler". The identification of the pose study in the Illustrator's Manual with Vettriano's painting led to media reporting that he "owed his composition in part" to that publication. Vettriano, his agent, and Brady herself, have all stated that his work makes use of the image in a way that adheres to norms of artistic practice and was in line with the publisher's intent.

Awards and recognition
Brady has been nominated for several awards from the Irish Film & Television Academy for her work. She won the 1999 Golden Nymph Award for Best Actress for her starring role as Sheila Cloney in the RTÉ-BBC co-production, A Love Divided at the Monte-Carlo Television Festival. In 2020, Brady was listed as number 43 on The Irish Times list of Ireland's 50 greatest film actors.

Personal life
In 2001, Brady moved to Los Angeles, where she met English photographer Nick Brandt, whom she married in December 2002 in the Chyulu Hills of Kenya. A Georgian flat is her Dublin home when in the city. She has discussed in interviews that she originally left Ireland as she found it "a repressive place to be a woman" at the time, with little opportunity. The 2015 marriage equality and 2018 abortion referendums, as well as the expanding Irish industry, changed her mind, making her realise "Oh, this is a different Ireland and it accepts me now." Brady had a "Catholic upbringing", but as of 2002 considered herself an atheist.