Kathryn Hunter
(Picture: Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures Ltd)So Hollywood has finally woken up to something the international theatre community has known about for over three decades: the shapeshifting brilliance of Kathryn Hunter. At 64, the actor and director, a favourite of Peter Brook and a leading player for Complicité, the RSC and Shakespeare’s Globe, is basking in American adulation and a New York Film Critics’ Best Supporting Actor award for her role as all three witches in Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth. See it on the big screen rather than on Apple TV if you can: she nearly steals the show from Oscar winners Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand.
The attention is “very humbling,” Hunter says, a voice that’s half gravel, half molasses emerging from her tiny 5’1” frame. “My niece wrote me an email saying ‘congratulations on your best supported actress award’, which I thought was a telling slip as it was all done with the support of Joel and Fran: the collaborative aspect of working with them was fantastic and I feel we created the witches together. They’re big theatre fans and saw me in The Bee by Hideki Noda [which toured internationally in 2012] where I played a Japanese businessman who cut children’s fingers off.”
