Imelda Staunton has been awarded an Olivier Award for her critically acclaimed performance in Gypsy, triumphing in the Best Actress in a Musical category.
The win, which marks the fourth Olivier Award win in her illustrious stage career, saw the actor face competition from Laura Pitt-Pulford, Natalie Dew, Sophie Thompson and Tracie Bennett to take home the award for her role as Momma Rose in the Stephen Sondheim classic.
Staunton first took on the challenging role when the show premiered at Chichester Festival Theatre in 2014, reprising it in the show’s subsequent West End transfer where it collected a string of five star glowing reviews.
Writing about her performance at the show’s London opening night, Official London Theatre commented: “Her ruthless determination to turn her daughters into stars mixed with her comic interfering in the various vaudeville acts she conjures for them is a pure joy to watch.”
It was a sentiment shared by not only the critics and audiences, but other award panels with the actor picking up an Evening Standard Theatre Award earlier this year for the role.
Speaking to Official London Theatre shortly after the show had found out it had been nominated for eight awards, Staunton spoke about the experience of playing such a strong character, commenting: “She’s such a complicated and disturbing woman, it isn’t just like going out and singing lovely songs and having a nice evening, there’s almost a Greek quality to her misery and her inner demons, so it was very rich to have to mine that character for everything she was.”
