‘Hey, they were in Game of Thrones’—Where else have you seen these 50 GoT cast members?
23) MICHELLE FAIRLEY
When it comes to fictional characters, you’ll probably never meet two people finer than Lord Eddard Stark and his wife Catelyn, played like a lioness by Michelle Fairley. Alas, Game of Thrones shows little mercy to the nice guys.
Fairley has been acting professionally since 1987, and her better-known roles include Mrs. Marlish in The Others (2009), Sally Mitchell in Philomena (2013) and Mrs. Nickerson In The Heart of the Sea (2015). She is also well-established on the London West End stage. The Game of Thrones writers offered her the role of Catelyn Stark after seeing her performance as Iago’s wife Emilia in a 2008 production of Othello, as Fairley explained in a 2015 interview with The Telegraph:
"I think in retrospect [the writers] needed somebody to go on an emotional journey. Catelyn goes through the loss of her husband, the loss of her children and eventually makes the decision to kill herself because she thinks that there’s nothing left to live for – and they thought, because of the final scenes in Othello, that I could maybe achieve that for them."
Early on, the Irish-born Fairley joined the Belfast Fringe Benefit repertory company where she tread the boards alongside future Thrones co-star Conleth Hill (Lord Varys).
Fairley may feel familiar to you from her large body of TV work. She appeared as Margot Al-Harazi in the popular series 24: Live Another Day (2014, photo above) and many other roles, such as Margaret Langston in Resurrection (2014-2015), Ava Hessington in Suits (2013) and Louise Young in Misfits (2009).
As for that small role you can’t quite place her in, Fairley starred as Mrs. Granger in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part I in 2010.
You’ll be seeing a lot of Fairley on TV in 2017. She’s starring as Freya Lennox in the series Fortitude and as Margaret Beaufort in the mini-series The White Princess alongside Essie Davis (Lady Crane).