Starring Tara Fitzgerald

I really can’t put my finger on specific reasons why I have selected Tara Fitzgerald as one of my Treasures. A sensuous mouth alone is not enough. It’s not as if she specialises in one of my favourite television genres. Nor can I recall her playing many characters I can recognise or with whom I can identify. Her early roles always seemed to involve smoking – not an appealing trait – a habit which may have contributed to Tara’s unusually deep vocal timbre. And yet…

Back in the Nineties, Fitzgerald developed a reputation as a classical stage actor and star of independent films, while her early TV work was primarily in productions more suited to Mum and Dad than me. I’m sure I only saw her in Channel 4’s 1982 serial The Camomile Lawn because of the massive controversy stirred by the prudish Daily Mail brigade, and in the Beeb’s Anglo-Saxon Attitudes the same year as Dad was particularly predisposed to the work of novelist Angus Wilson. 

She has also donned many a bonnet and corset over the years, and Mum would almost certainly have admired her in Jane Eyre and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, along with The Virgin Queen in 2006. My only recollection of watching Tara in a costume drama was as Daphne du Maurier’s wild-haired headstrong heroine in Frenchman’s Creek, a sort of posh Poldark on the high seas. 

All very tempestuous stuff but I had already been slightly smitten during Channel 4’s broadcast of their Film 4 production Brassed Off in 1996, with not a ripped bodice in sight. Set in the mid-Eighties miners’ strike, it was part love letter to colliery band music, part comedy, part political drama and part romance. The latter featured Ewan McGregor and Fitzgerald, whose arrival in a traditionally male brass band as undercover Coal Board spy and talented flugelhorn player raised more than a few eyebrows. Who can forget the fleeting coffee invitation scene, as seductive as any in the entire history of cinema?! I don’t think it was Ewan’s tenor horn she was after…. 

Probably Tara Fitzgerald’s most enduring role was as forensic scientist Eve Lockhart in Waking the Dead. Her Victorian dresses and band uniform replaced by a bland lab coat, she slipped organically into the established cast led by fellow Treasures Sue Johnston and Trevor Eve and even reprised the part in a spin-off The Body Farm. Unfortunately its Tuesday night slot clashed with my choir rehearsals and I couldn’t be arsed to video it. Sorry, Tara. In any case, feeble audience figures meant it wasn’t re-commissioned and that was that. 

In 2014 she portrayed a lesbian character in series one of Kay Mellor’s drama In The Club. While not one of the leading parts, her Susie was a crucial link in the complex chain of relationships woven throughout the absorbing programme. This proved to be the last time I recall seeing Fitzgerald as a well-rounded modern woman, but she has popped up in several programmes requiring an uptight or downright creepy middle-aged matron, usually resident of a creaking mansion. 

There was 2018’s spooky Welsh thriller Requiem, in which Tara played an antiques dealer interested in the supernatural, also reminiscent of her part in an older Murder In Mind episode set in a Victorian haunted house. She was the socialite suspect Tansy in the excellent first TV outing of Cormoran Strike in The Cuckoo’s Calling and an admirably aristocratic Lady Hermione in the recent atmospheric adaptation of Agatha Christie’s The ABC Murders. 

Such has been her inclination towards haughty, husky-voiced, hard-faced biddies that I was amazed to be reminded that Tara Fitzgerald is still only 53, which leaves her many decades more to play dowager duchesses and flirtatious silk stockings nostalgic for their youth. So what is it which has secured her Treasure status? In the end, I reckon it must be her ability, without resort to quirks or exaggerated mannerisms (that’s you, Shirley Henderson!), to steal scenes at will. I should endeavour to catch her future performances but I do draw the line at re-runs of Game of Thrones.