Eve Shapiro

Evelyn L. Shapiro (13 August 1930—1 December 2022) was a South Africa–born drama teacher and theatre director, who had a profound influence on generations of acting and opera-singing students in the UK and the USA. A talented young amateur theatre director, she left South Africa to train professionally at RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art) in London and on graduation in 1961 joined the academy's staff as a director and teacher. In the mid-1970s, Shapiro moved to New York to join the Drama Division at the Juilliard School where she taught and directed. In 1988, she transferred to Juilliard's Vocal Arts Division to teach acting to opera students, and to direct operas. Shapiro continued to work at Juilliard until she was 90. In her working career, she directed more than 100 plays and operas in Europe and the United States.

Early life Eve Shapiro was born on 13 August 1930 in Pretoria, Gauteng Province, South Africa into a musical family in the city's small Jewish community. While still at school she showed a precocious interest in drama and became involved in South Africa's then thriving amateur theatre scene. She had an ambition to be an actor but, shortly after leaving school, in 1949 she was asked to direct a one–act play, and, as she confessed in an interview towards the end of her life, at her then age "ignorance was bliss", and she agreed. In 1949 the play was entered in the annual competition organised by the Federation of Amateur Theatrical Societies of South Africa (FATSSA) and won the award for the best amateur theatrical production of the year.

Anxious to pursue her directing ambitions she approached the Principal of RADA, John Fernald, and asked if she could direct a play for the academy. Fernald had three student-performed plays lined up to tour to Basel, Switzerland, and offered Shapiro one of them to direct, which was Village Wooing, by George Bernard Shaw. She accepted the task and it became her first professional theatre engagement. "I was very lucky," Shapiro recalled. "I had people who had faith in me and gave me a chance." began to share her life and an apartment in Park Crescent in Marylebone, London with her earlier stage management tutor at the academy, Dorothy Tenham. It was there that Shapiro first began her lifelong habit of inviting students to her home for coaching, to read and discuss passages from drama, particularly William Shakespeare, "dispense wisdom over tea and bake scones together".

Many of the student actors Shapiro taught and mentored at RADA went on to recognition and success. Among them were Kenneth Cranham, Henry Goodman, Sir Anthony Hopkins, Robert Lindsay, Sir Jonathan Pryce, Alan Rickman, and Dame Imelda Staunton.

As well as tutoring, Shapiro directed as many as three major student productions every year at RADA for public performance in the academy's theatres. The choice of plays to be produced and their casting was usually the prerogative of the principal of the academy. During her time on the staff Shapiro was invited to return regularly to the works of Shakespeare, directing Richard III, Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear among others of his plays. She also brought a wide variety of British and Irish writers' works to RADA's stages with, for instance, plays by George Bernard Shaw (Village Wooing), John Ford ('Tis Pity She's a Whore), John Webster (The Duchess of Malfi) and Harold Brighouse (Hobson's Choice). Playwrights of the European continent were not forgotten, with works by, for instance, Luigi Pirandello (Henry IV and Six Characters in Search of an Author), Friedrich Schiller (Mary Stuart), Jean Anouilh (Antigone), Henrik Ibsen (The Lady from the Sea), Ivan Turgenev (A Month in the Country), Bertolt Brecht (Mother Courage and her Children) and Federico García Lorca (The House of Bernarda Alba). Anton Chekhov was one of Shapiro's favourite playwrights, with productions of The Cherry Orchard, Three Sisters, and others. She liked also to specialise in American works, even musicals. Kiss Me, Kate and Man of La Mancha appeared under her direction, as well as more straight fair, like Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night, William Inge's Picnic, and Philip Barry's The Philadelphia Story. Tennessee Williams was a perennial favourite, with productions of A Streetcar named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Glass Menagerie, and The Night of the Iguana, and plays by Arthur Miller, such as The Crucible and Death of a Salesman. Shapiro directed 40 or so plays at RADA during her time on the academy's staff. "Interestingly," she told a US interviewer in 2002, "when I was working in England, I always did American plays, I loved them. Williams, O'Neill, Miller; I even did Picnic. I was always the person who did American plays." She accepted the invitation and stayed in New York with the production for three months. Shapiro remained in New York to carry out that task, after which the school asked her to stay longer. Shapiro consulted with Hugh Cruttwell (who had taken over as RADA principal some years previously) in London who said "you can stay, as long as you come back".

Shapiro settled permanently in New York and remained there for 43 years, until her death, establishing herself from 1983 in an eighth–floor Upper West Side apartment on the corner of Riverside Drive and West 84th Street in Manhattan overlooking the Hudson River. Shapiro also bought a small 1985–built townhouse in the town of Rhinebeck 100 miles north of Manhattan, up the Hudson River. She sold this house in 2015.

Shapiro's work with the Juilliard Drama Division, similar to her experience at RADA, involved teaching, mentoring and directing acting students, the two dozen or so chosen each year from any of up to 2,000 applicants for a four–year course. Among the many students who came under her influence at Juilliard and who have since become familiar faces on stage, film and television were Viola Davis, Greg Jbara, Val Kilmer (at the time the youngest person to be admitted to the Drama Division), Kevin Spacey (though he did not graduate) Jessica Chastain, and Kelly McGillis who, struggling with her key role in the 1985 film Witness, "in the deep of the night ... calls her old acting teacher, Eve Shapiro, who says, "Trust yourself, Kelly. Live the life of this woman and forget you'."

In her time at Juilliard Shapiro directed more than 20 major drama productions with third and final year acting students, among them several plays by George Bernard Shaw (You Never Can Tell, Getting Married, Heartbreak House, Man and Superman, Misalliance, and Major Barbara), three by Anton Chekhov (Uncle Vanya, The Seagull, and Three Sisters), some classical fare like John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, Henrik Ibsen's The Lady From the Sea and Hedda Gabler, Ivan Turgenev's A Month in the Country, The Winter's Tale and Richard II by William Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. There was a sprinkling of more modern works, including Another Part of the Forest by Lillian Hellman, C. P. Taylor's And a Nightingale Sang, Artaud at Rodez by Charles Marowitz, and - a favourite of Shapiro's - Caryl Churchill's Top Girls. Of her production of Top Girls, "a richly complex study of bourgeois feminism", Shapiro relished "the intense positive atmosphere of rehearsals due to the deep connection the women have with the work". As well as working with third and final year students, Shapiro directed some 15 or so major drama rehearsal projects with first and second year students between 1976 and 1988.

In 1988, Juilliard's then-president, Joseph W. Polisi, asked Shapiro to direct an opera. The work chosen for the Juilliard Opera Center production was The Crucible by Robert Ward (based on Arthur Miller's 1953 play of the same name), its first New York presentation for 20 years. "As directed by Eve Shapiro," wrote John Rockwell in The New York Times, "...the opera unfurls like a Brechtian morality play." Following the success of The Crucible, Shapiro was invited to join Juillard's Opera faculty, relinquishing her place on the Drama staff (though she continued to direct one major drama there every year as a guest Master Director for the next 10 years). Over the ensuing 30 years Shapiro directed numerous operas for the Vocal Arts Division including, notably, Così fan tutte by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Susannah by Carlisle Floyd, Gioachino Rossini's La Cenerentola, Eugene Onegin by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Die Fledermaus by Johann Strauss II, Bedrich Smetana's The Bartered Bride, and Benjamin Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Rape of Lucretia.

As well as directing, Shapiro continued as an acting teacher in the Vocal Arts Department, and with Mary Birnbaum, associate director, Shapiro helped to build a new version of the Vocal Arts' Artists Diploma programme focused intensively on the art and craft of acting. She continued in this rôle, combined with her regular direction of operas, until her retirement.

Among the many students in the Vocal Arts Division whose acting benefitted from Shapiro's teaching were Paul Appleby, Julia Bullock, Catherine Hancock, Isabel Leonard, Mariateresa Magisano, Erin Morley, Makiko Narumi, Takaoki Onishi, and Susanna Phillips.

As well as her continuing commitment to the Vocal Arts Division and her regular productions for the Drama Division, Shapiro found time for a variety of extra-curricular work opportunities.

In the early 2000s, Shapiro directed a number of productions for The Acting Company, the major touring classical theatre company in the US which was founded in 1972 by Juilliard Drama Division director John Houseman and Administrator Margot Harley and still casts broadly from young Juilliard drama graduates. Shapiro directed three major Shakespeare plays for the company: Macbeth, The Taming of the Shrew, and in 2004 Richard III.

Shapiro also worked regularly with the Bard College Conservatory of Music in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, which launched a graduate program in Vocal Arts in 2006 under the leadership of American soprano Dawn Upshaw. With a second home at Rhinebeck, conveniently close to Bard College, Shapiro joined the Vocal Arts faculty, teaching in the acting workshop and also conducting director's master classes.

In 2010, at the request of a former acting student of Shapiro's, Eve Annenberg, who was directing and producing the film Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish, Shapiro coached inexperienced actors Melissa Weisz, who played Juliet, and two reformed "ethically challenged" young Hasidic men Laser Weiss and Mendel Zafir, who played Romeo and Benvolio respectively. Despite being tipped off about their shady past Shapiro was charmed by the two men, telling the New York Daily News: "They have charisma and that's something you cannot teach. You either have it or you don't." Shapiro was credited as the film's dramaturge and script editor.

Towards the end of her working life, Shapiro was awarded two honours. In 2001 as a graduate and former academic staff member she was formally elected an Associate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London

Shapiro was a noticeably diminutive woman, in her prime being at most 59 inches (1.5 metres) tall and even shorter in her old age. She was affectionately described by one of her colleagues as "a tiny Titan".

Later life Throughout her career, first at RADA and then at Juilliard, Shapiro built and preserved sustaining and often loving relationships with many of her students. In a video interview at Juilliard in 2016 Shapiro said, "the wonderful thing about teaching is you never know how many lives you touch." A Juilliard Vocal Arts student, Devon Guthrie, recalled that "Eve was one of the reasons why I chose to study at Juilliard ... To this day I use the techniques and wisdom she taught."

Many faculty colleagues appreciated Shapiro's talents. Hugh Cruttwell, John Fernald's successor as principal of RADA during Shapiro's time there, said of her: "She has a remarkable gift of getting the best out of each actor. Group after group has found her a uniquely valuable teacher and director."

Shapiro died in New York on 1 December 2022 at the age of 92.