Stage Actress Katrin Cartlidge Dies, Aged 41

Katrin Cartlidge, the award-winning stage and screen actress, has died aged 41, of complications from pneumonia and septicaemia.

Last seen on the London stage in Rebecca Gilman’s Boy Gets Girl which premiered at the Royal Court in November 2001, she was nominated for the 2002 Whatsonstage.com’s London “Theatregoers’ Choice” Theatre Awards for that performance. Her other work at the Royal Court included Nick Ward’s Apart from George and The Terrible Voice of Satan, and at the start of her career in the 1980s she did hundreds of readings for the theatre.

Her other major London stage appearances included Theatre de Complicite’s Mnemonic, The Shape of the Table, Salome and The Trial all at the National Theatre, and The Present at the Bush Theatre.

It was as a film actress, however, that she achieved even greater distinction, winning the Evening Standard Film Award for Best Actress in 1997 for her performance in Career Girls. She previously won the Most Promising European Actress of the Year, Press and Jury prize, at the Geneva Film Festival for her role in Mike Leigh’s Naked. Other major films in which she starred included Breaking the Waves, Before the Rain, Clare Dolan and No Man’s Land.

The London-born actress began her career in the theatre as a dresser to the late actress Jill Bennett in the number one dressing room at the Royal Court, which Cartlidge herself would go on to occupy when she gave her final London stage appearance there in Boy Gets Girl.

Simon McBurney, who directed Mnemonic, has paid tribute to her stage performances, saying they “were characterised by quiet integrity and total commitment. She worked with enormous humour and intensity extraordinary because it was so light, positive and considerate of others.” Referring to her work in Mnemonic, he goes on, “She was its motor and its energiser, as she was with any project she worked on, as the play voyaged from Huddersfield to New York.

– Mark Shenton