Tara Fitzgerald on AllMovie

Never one to have scrounged for work while biding her time toiling away at odd jobs, British actress Tara Fitzgerald was one of those fortunate few who found success straight out of drama school. Reveling in the discipline and the "hard graft" that goes along with being an actress, she admits that her positive view of the industry may be idealistic, though is quick to mention that she takes nothing for granted.

Born in London, England, the actress of stage and screen (and grand-niece of actress Geraldine Fitzgerald) acknowledges that her cinematic blessing was her screen debut in the old-fashioned romantic comedy Hear My Song (1991), which earned the actress positive notice. Avoiding the Hollywood trappings that shattered her youthful illusions of Tinseltown, Fitzgerald resides in Barnes, West London, with her fiancé, actor Dorian Healy.

An actress with a penchant for roles in costume period dramas, Fitzgerald is equally comfortable on the small screen and the silver screen, often juggling the two between her stage roles. Fitzgerald appeared as Ophelia opposite Ralph Fiennes' Hamlet in the 1995 Broadway production, and her other stage work includes roles in Antigone (1999) and A Streetcar Named Desire (2000) (in the role of Blanche Dubois at the Bristol Old Vic).

Fitzgerald gained wide recognition in 1995 in another romantic comedy, the exhaustingly titled The Englishman Who Went up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain, and appeared the next year as the flugelhorn-wielding muse opposite Ewan McGregor in Brassed Off. Following a series of lavish, made-for-television costume dramas, Fitzgerald returned to feature films with another eccentric small-town comedy, Conquest (1998).