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Maria Doyle Kennedy
Maria Doyle Kennedy
Biographical information
Birthplace: Clontarf, Dublin, Ireland
Nationality: Irish
Birthdate: September 25, 1964
Occupation: Actress, Singer
Years active: 1980s–present (Singer)
1991–present (Actress)
Series information
Portrays: Mrs. S

Maria Doyle Kennedy is an award-winning Irish actress and singer. As an actress she is possibly best known for her roles as Queen Katherine of Aragon in the award winning The Tudors and in The General, as the title character's wife, Frances.

Musical career[]

In 2001, Maria released music on Mermaid Records, a label she founded herself. Her debut solo album Charm was released in 2001. She coordinated Sirens which is a compilation album of female artists and which was released in 2003. She released an album Skullcover consisting of cover versions in 2005, and Mütter in 2007. Maria’s new album with her husband Kieran is called The Storms Are On the Ocean. A collection of Appalachian standards dressed in darned gowns, its spiritual siblings are Plant's Band of Joy, PJ's White Chalk and Gillian Welch's stark daguerreotypes. Here are courtly tunes, murder ballads, child ballads and death fugues all backlit by Kieran Kennedy's acoustic guitar, banjo and piano. Both of her solo albums have been nominated for Meteor awards and her forthcoming project sees her teamed with U.S. country music legend John Prine Damien Rice and Paul Brady. Sing was released September 2012 and reached no 4 in Irish charts.

Acting career[]

Maria Doyle Kennedy played a key role in the 1991 film The Commitments. In 2007 and 2008, Maria played Queen Katherine of Aragon (King Henry VIII's first wife and mother of Mary I of England) on The Tudors. She was rumoured to have returned as Katherine of Aragon in a dream sequence to The Tudors for the fourth and final season in mid 2010, and this was confirmed when the first promotional picture of the season showed Katherine (along with King Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Katherine Howard and Katherine Parr) on the cover. Kennedy also appeared on Irish screens early in 2011 on TG4's Corp & Anam in her first Irish language acting role. Kennedy portrayed Sonya, a nanny to Dexter Morgan's son Harrison in the fifth season of Showtime's Dexter.[4] She joined the cast of ITV's period drama Downton Abbey, appearing as Vera Bates, estranged wife of the Earl of Grantham's valet John Bates. In 2012 she also played a leading role in the ITV mini-series Titanic.

Gallery[]

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