Caitlin FitzGerald, the actress who refuses to let the wife fade into the background

Caitlin FitzGerald

Photo: iDominick / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	August 25, 1983 Camden, Maine, United States
Occupation	Actress
Known for	The Trial of the Chicago 7, It's Complicated, Taking Woodstock

Look down the list of women Caitlin FitzGerald has been asked to play and a pattern shows itself quickly: the doctor’s wife, the heir’s girlfriend, the general’s bride, the mother standing at the edge of a family secret. These are parts written to sit beside somebody else’s story, and each carries the risk she named when she took on Desdemona, that the character ends up “sort of just pious and only tragic”. Her career has been a long argument against that fate. She plays the woman next to the man at the centre as if she could take the scene from him at any moment, and often enough she does.

The habit was formed early, in a small town on the coast of Maine. FitzGerald grew up in Camden, the town where she was born. Her mother, Pam Allen, wrote Knitting for Dummies and founded the yarn company Quince & Co.; her father, Des FitzGerald, ran the ContiSea unit of ContiGroup and founded the Ducktrap River Fish Farm. She has described herself as one of those “really obnoxious theatre kids” who did every play within reach from about the age of six, and she carried the obsession through boarding school at Concord Academy in Massachusetts and into NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she trained at the Stella Adler Studio. A spell studying Shakespeare at RADA in London planted an ambition that would take two decades to pay off.

Her first professional job came at 25, for an actress born on 25 August 1983 who had been rehearsing for that kind of part since childhood: Juliet, at Shakespeare Santa Cruz. Back in New York she played Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler in a private house for an audience of twenty-five, and that tiny production earned her the review that has shadowed her ever since. Ben Brantley of The New York Times found “a face that seems made for cinematic close-ups” and, in the same breath, too little gravitas, comparing her to an intimidatingly classy high-school senior.

The close-ups arrived in small doses. She was one of Meryl Streep‘s daughters in Nancy Meyers’ It’s Complicated, Epperly Lawrence in Gossip Girl, a face in Whit Stillman’s campus comedy Damsels in Distress and a member of Edward Burns’s repertory in Newlyweds and The Fitzgerald Family Christmas. The most personal project of that stretch was Like the Water, an independent film set in Maine that she co-wrote and starred in, drawn from the sudden death of her childhood classmate Sabrina Seelig. A recurring part in Rectify followed.

Then Showtime cast her as Libby Masters in Masters of Sex. Over four seasons and 46 episodes, Libby was the wife at home while her husband, played by Michael Sheen, and Virginia Johnson, played by Lizzy Caplan, built a scientific study of human sexuality at the hospital. On paper she was the obstacle, the conservative housewife who calls her husband “Daddy”. IndieWire later ranked her among the most underrated characters on television and pointed out that Libby “could easily have come across as insipid”; FitzGerald made her perceptive instead, a woman who sees exactly what is happening in her marriage and is not allowed to say so.

The trouble with doing that so well is that the industry takes the wrong lesson from it. After Libby came Kat in Adult Beginners, the girlfriend who walks out on Nick Kroll‘s failed tech founder; Tabitha Hayes, Roman Roy’s girlfriend across the first two seasons of Succession; and Simone in Sweetbitter, the older colleague the young heroine wants to become. Brantley’s split verdict, admiring the presence and doubting the weight, quietly became the shape of the casting. Her true leads, such as the rival-actress thriller Always Shine, reached small audiences. Even the London stage has not entirely settled the question: the Theatre Royal Haymarket Othello divided critics, with Time Out finding the production glossy and lighter than usual, and the praise for her Desdemona came in the language of light, one reviewer calling her luminous, another describing her as the bright, funny light of the play, compliments that honour radiance more readily than force.

The roles that pushed back were the ones that gave her authority. In Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 she played Daphne O’Connor, the undercover FBI agent who gets close to Jeremy Strong‘s Jerry Rubin, a film she calls “one of the best scripts I’ve gotten to work on”. In the third season of UnREAL she was Serena Wolcott, the bachelorette at the centre of the show-within-the-show Everlasting, finally the woman being chased rather than the one waiting. Smaller turns in Station Eleven and Inventing Anna kept her in the prestige rotation.

London changed the terms. She met the Irish actor Aidan Turner on the set of The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot, opposite Sam Elliott; they married in Italy in August 2020, their son was born in January 2022, and the family lives in an 18th-century house in East London. The stage followed. In 2023 she was Elizabeth Proctor in the National Theatre’s The Crucible at the Gielgud, directed by Lyndsey Turner. Then came Desdemona in Tom Morris’s Othello at the Haymarket, opposite David Harewood’s Othello and Toby Jones’s Iago, with music by PJ Harvey. She admitted she cried after both auditions, “very publicly on the street”, because “doing Shakespeare in London is my life dream”. Her stated aim was a Desdemona who is “Othello’s equal”, a woman of faith who “doesn’t go down without a fight”. The production closed in January and was filmed for cinemas, where it opened on 4 March 2026.

The screen work has moved with her into the role of the parent. In Prime Video’s We Were Liars she plays Penny Sinclair, Cadence’s mother and one of three sisters fighting over a wealthy family’s island and its secrets. The series was renewed for a second season adapting E. Lockhart’s prequel Family of Liars, with flashbacks to 1999 and Elysia Roorbach as the teenage Penny; filming in Nova Scotia wrapped at the start of October, and no premiere date has been announced.

Before that comes Above the Below, the Lionsgate survival thriller due in cinemas in December. FitzGerald plays Brooks, one of three astronauts whose capsule loses control during re-entry and comes to rest on the seabed, alongside Idris Elba, who co-directs with Martin Owen, and Hero Fiennes Tiffin. Brooks and Elba’s captain must decide whether to abandon a trapped crewmate or try to free him before his air runs out. For once the man at the centre is sealed in the same small room with her, and nobody gets to stand in the background.

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Tags: actors, actresses, Idris Elba, Succession, Above the Below, Caitlin FitzGerald, Masters of Sex

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