Kristin Linklater


Kristin Linklater was a Scottish vocal coach, acting teacher, actor, theatre director, and author. She retired from the Theatre Arts Division of Columbia University where she was professor emerita. She taught residential courses in Orkney. Kristin Linklater died on 5 June 2020, aged 84, at her home, Housegarth, Quoyloo, Orkney.

Biography

Born in Edinburgh and brought up in the Orkney Isles, Scotland, Linklater trained with Michael MacOwan and Iris Warren at LAMDA. After graduating from LAMDA, she taught voice there for six years. During the 1960s, she relocated to the United States and worked with the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota and the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario, Canada. Between 1964-78, she worked as a vocal coach for acting companies led by Robert Whitehead, Harold Clurman, Elia Kazan, and Joseph Chaikin, among others. Linklater also taught voice in New York University’s graduate theater program from 1965 to 1978.
Educated at St Leonards School and Downe House School, she was a founding member in 1973 of Shakespeare & Company which was for many years in residence on the former estate of Edith Wharton in Lenox, Massachusetts. Linklater and several British-trained American actors founded the acting troupe of the same name, Shakespeare & Company. She served as co-director, with Tina Packer. She left in the mid-1990s to develop her own approach to voice for actors, influenced by her teachers at LAMDA as well as the Alexander Technique.
Her work was designed to liberate the natural function of the vocal mechanism as opposed to developing a vocal technique. Her writings on voice included Freeing the Natural Voice and Freeing Shakespeare's Voice. ;
She was of partial Swedish descent, through her father, Scottish novelist Eric Linklater.
Linklater trained many well-known actors, including Sir Patrick Stewart, Donald Sutherland, Alfre Woodard, Mary Tyler Moore, Bill Murray, Angela Bassett, Courtney Vance, Sigourney Weaver, Sam Rockwell and Bernadette Peters. Linklater was a teacher and head of the Acting program at Emerson College from 1990–96. While at Emerson, Linklater and Harvard psychologist Carol Gilligan led a group called the Company of Women, which explored Shakespeare from a woman’s point of view.
In 2013, Linklater established the Linklater Voice Centre in Quoyloo, Orkney, Scotland, to train and coach students in voice technique. That year she was made an honorary fellow of the University of the Highlands and Islands.
Her son is actor Hamish Linklater, who appeared on the CBS sitcom The Crazy Ones. Her father was novelist Eric Linklater, and her mother was social activist, Marjorie MacIntyre. Her brothers Magnus and Andro Linklater are writers. She had a sister, Alison, who is a painter.
On 6 June 2020 the family and friends of Kristin announced on Facebook: "The family and friends of Kristin Linklater are sad to announce her death at the age of 84 at Housegarth, Quoyloo, Orkney in the early hours of Friday 5th June. An inspirational writer, teacher of voice and Shakespeare, she helped a generation of performers, artists and people from all walks of life, to free their natural voice."