Biographie
Prolific character actress born in Secunderabad, British India. A RADA graduate of 1954, Ann Firbank (sometimes credited as 'Annie') made her acting debut at Her Majesty's Theatre in Carlisle that same year. She has performed in numerous classic plays on most of England's great stages, including the Royal Court Theatre, the National Theatre under the direction of Laurence Olivier, the London Old Vic, the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon and the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester. As late as 2012, she was lauded for her ageless stage presence in a production of The Golden Dragon in Bangalore, India.
On the screen, Firbank is best known as Staff Nurse Helen Lloyd in the classic farce Carry on Nurse (1959) and for her starring role as Anne Elliot in Granada TV's 1971 adaptation of Jane Austen's novel Persuasion (1971). She has made a number of notable appearances in other period dramas, including as Amy Robsart, the wife of Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester, in Kenilworth (1957); as Mary Quartermaine, whose affections two lovers compete for in an archery contest, in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1955); Danish-born Princess/Queen Alexandra in Lillie (1978); the Comtess de Tournay, a refugee from Robespierre's reign of terror, in The Scarlet Pimpernel (1982); as the wife of the callous, intolerant Major Callendar in A Passage to India (1984) and as Lady Anne Boleyn, the maternal great-great grandmother of Elizabeth I (2005) (superbly played by Helen Mirren). More recently, she has portrayed a Tatooine elder in Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker (2019) and the elven oracle Ithlinne in The Witcher (2019). She has acted in dozens of TV shows as a guest star, frequently in crime/mystery programs like Danger Man (1960), Maigret (1960), Poirot (1989), Midsomer Murders (1997) and New Tricks (2003). Firbank has also been acclaimed for her 2014 performance as Rebecca Nurse, a woman falsely accused and executed at the Salem Witch Trials of 1692, in Arthur Miller 's The Crucible (2014) at the Old Vic.
