Cos Cob resident Florence Phillips has been delighting audiences of all ages for many years. Living part-time in Cape Cod, Florence is an active member of the Wellfleet Theatre community. She created the role of Lear in an all-woman production of the Shakespeare classic. "Phillips is spellbinding as the aging queen bringing strength, wisdom and tenderness to a role as demanding as any written." (John Watters - The Cape Chronicle)
A regular featured player on such shows as Law & Order, Guiding Light, and As the World Turns, Florence is also featured in the PBS documentary Amazing Grace. She studied with Morris Carnovsky, one of the co-founders of the Group Theatre, as well as with Phoebe Brand, Richard Edelman and Jacques Lecoq in Paris. She has appeared in productions of Talking With, Entertaining Mr. Sloane, A Lie of the Mind, Buried Child, True West, Reckless, French Gray, The Last Yankee, The Road to Mecca, Bosoms & Neglect, On the Verge, A Christmas Carol, The Hemingway Play, Requiem for a Nun, Lettice and Lovage, A View From the Bridge and The Country Woman. She understudied Estelle Parsons in Israel Horowitz' The Reason We Eat and appeared in the premiere production of The Runner Stumbles, directed by Austin Pendleton.
Florence is passionate about education and has shared her love of theatre and language with children as the originator of "Living Out Loud", a dramatic language arts program in schools. Time Magazine wrote: "Florence Phillips is a professional actress with a very special audience: the students in the Cos Cob School in Connecticut. As the school's artist-in-residence, she flies through fairy tales, acts out scenes from Shakespeare and introduces the youngsters to the poetry of Whitman, Shelley and Tennyson. From parents she gets a standing ovation."
Ms. Phillips will appear this season in "Holiday Memories" by Truman Capote as the delightful, dotty "Aunt Sook" and at the Newtown Family Festival as Ballet once-great Irina Bolshetskaya introducing the magic of "The Nutcracker" to a new generation in Fred Stroppel's "Land of the Sweets".
