Kristin Linklater

Kristin Linklater (22 April 1936 – 5 June 2020) 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.

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 and 1978, 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.

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 to 1996. 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.

Her son by James Lincoln Cormeny is actor Hamish Linklater, who starred in the hit Netflix miniseries Midnight Mass. Her father was novelist Eric Linklater, and her mother was social activist, Marjorie MacIntyre. Her brothers Magnus and Andro Linklater are writers.

On 5 June 2020, Linklater died of a heart attack at the age of 84.