The Stratford Festival's Legacy Award will be presented next week.
Lucy Peacock, a Festival member for 36 years, will be honoured with the award on Oct. 2 during the Stratford Festival's gala at the Four Seasons Hotel in Toronto.
Peacock has performed in more than 80 Stratford Festival productions, performed for audiences at the National Arts Centre, The Segal Centre, Centaur Theatre, Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre, The Citadel Theatre, The Globe Theatre, Canadian Stage, Vancouver Playhouse, The Coal Mine Theatre, The Winter Garden and Broadway’s Lincoln Center.
“Lucy is that most rare and important thing: a fearless artist who will bravely and without shame go to dark places in order to realize a playwright’s vision,” said Stratford Festival Artistic Director Antoni Cimolino in a release. “This year, for instance, Lucy plays both the ridiculously greedy Germaine Lauzon in Michel Tremblay’s iconic Quebec tragicomedy Les Belles-Soeurs and the powerful racist matriarch in Alice Childress’s searing drama Wedding Band.”
A National Theatre School graduate, Peacock joined the Stratford acting company in 1984 and, in 1986, she played Ophelia in both Hamlet and Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. In 1988, she took on the lead role of Eliza Doolittle in the musical My Fair Lady, along with the roles of Lady Anne in Richard III and Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well.
In 2006, Peacock gave a tour-de-force performance as all seven characters in The Blonde, the Brunette and the Vengeful Redhead, a production that was brought back the following year to meet the demand for tickets and also went to the Vancouver Playhouse.
Among her many other key roles are Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Masha in Three Sisters and Lavinia in Titus Andronicus, all in 1989; Rosalind in As You Like It (1990, 2000); the Princess of France in Love’s Labour’s Lost (1992); Gwendolyn Fairfax in The Importance of Being Earnest (1993); Desdemona in Othello (1994); Viola in Twelfth Night (1994); Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew (1997); Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice (1999); Elmire in Tartuffe (2000); Portia in The Merchant of Venice (2001); Regan in King Lear, which also toured to New York’s Lincoln Center; Lady Macbeth (2004); the title character in The Duchess of Malfi (2006); Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing (2006); Nana in For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again (2010); the title role in Mary Stuart (2013); Kate Keller in All My Sons (2016); Volumnia in Coriolanus (2018); B in Three Tall Women (2021); and Queen Elizabeth in Richard III (2022).
Peacock’s musical work includes the lead role of Anna in The King and I (2003), Dolly Levi in Hello, Dolly! (2005), Morgan le Fey in Camelot (2011) and Mrs. Munch in Wanderlust (2012). She also hosted the hugely popular Late Night with Lucy cabarets in the early years of the Meighen Forum and volunteered her time to direct, host and perform in the annual Expect the Extraordinary fundraisers for Stratford’s Performing Arts Lodge, helping the charity raise more than $200,000.
Peacock has shared the stage and worked with directors and artists such as Christopher Plummer, John Neville, Richard Monette, Martha Henry, Antoni Cimolino, Brian Bedford, Sir Jonathan Miller, Carey Perloff, Robin Phillips, Susan H. Schulman, Brent Carver, Susan Wright, Janet Wright, Goldie Semple, Peter Hinton-Davis, Jackie Maxwell, Colm Feore, Seana McKenna, Peter Donaldson, Jillian Keiley and Robert Lepage.
“Lucy has been a deeply loved mentor to many young artists,” says Cimolino. “She also is a friend and champion to the more senior company members. And in those roles, she has supported several artistic directors as a counsellor and friend. I value her advice immensely.”
