Sophie Irene Hunter

Sophie Irene Hunter (born 16 March 1978) is an English theatre director, playwright and former actress and singer. She made her directorial debut in 2007 co-directing the experimental play The Terrific Electric at the Barbican Pit after her theatre company Boileroom was granted the Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Award. In addition, she has directed an Off-Off-Broadway revival of Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts (2010) at Access Theatre, the performance art titled Lucretia (2011) based on Benjamin Britten's opera The Rape of Lucretia at Location One's Abramovic Studio in New York City, and the Phantom Limb Company's 69° South also known as Shackleton Project (2011) which premièred at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Harvey Theatre and later toured North America. In August 2015, Hunter directed Phaedra and The Turn of the Screw to critical acclaim for the Happy Days Enniskillen International Beckett Festival and Aldeburgh Music, respectively. Early life and education Sophie Irene Hunter was born in Hammersmith district of London on 16 March 1978, she is the daughter of Anna Katharine (née Gow) and Charles Rupert. The couple later divorced. She has two younger brothers, Timothy and Patrick, as well as two half-siblings from her father's second marriage, Lily-Rose and Samuel. She is a niece of pianist Julius Drake. Her maternal grandfather is General Sir Michael James Gow, a British Army officer who worked with Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester in the 1950s and was Aide-de-Camp General to the Queen from 1981 to 1984. Hunter's maternal great-great grandfather was First World War politician J. E. B. Seely, 1st Baron Mottistone. Hunter attended St Paul's Girls' School in Hammersmith before studying Modern Languages with a concentration in French and Italian at the University of Oxford. After graduating from Oxford, Hunter lived in Paris to study avant-garde theatre for two years at the L'École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq. She then trained at the Saratoga International Theatre Institute in New York City under theatre and opera director Anne Bogart.