Acting
Karen Ardiff
Dublin, Ireland
Karen Ardiff is an Irish actor and writer. Ardiff was born in Dublin and attended Trinity College, Dublin's Samuel Beckett Centre. She has worked as an actress on stage and television as well as in Evelyn and Brooklyn. She has written, In Skagway, her first play, which was produced by Guna Nua Theatre company and won the Irish Playwrights and Screenwriters Guild Best New Play Award as well as the Stewart Parker/BBC Northern Ireland Award. Her first novel The Secret of my Face came out in 2007.
Acting credits
7.3In 1950s Ireland and New York, young Eilis Lacey has to choose between two men and two countries.
Brooklyn
2015
6.5Set in a small English town in 1959, a woman decides, against polite but ruthless local opposition, to open a bookshop, a decision which becomes a political minefield.
The Bookshop
2017
6.4Desmond Doyle is devastated when his wife abandons their family on the day after Christmas. His unemployment, and the fact that there is no woman in the house to care for the children—Evelyn, Dermot and Maurice—make it clear to the authorities this is an untenable situation. The Catholic Church and the Irish courts decide to put the Doyle children into Church-run orphanages.
Evelyn
2002
5.8When schoolteacher Kieran Johnson discovers that his father was not a French sailor (as he had been led to believe) but rather an Irish farmer, he looks to his mother for answers. When she refuses to provide any, Kieran travels to Ireland.
This Is My Father
1999
6.4Christina Noble overcomes the harsh difficulties of her childhood in Ireland to discover her destiny on the streets of Saigon. A true story.
Noble
2014
7.5Powerful drama set in 1960s Ireland about a young, unmarried mother-to-be whose family sends her to a convent. There, out of sight of society, her work in the laundry provides her with close friendships, which bring hope and relief from daily prayer and penance. (Radio Times)
Sinners
2002
9.0A Terrible Beauty is the story of the men and women of the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916, Irish and British, caught up in a conflict many did not understand and of the innocent men and boys, executed because of what transpired in The Battle of Mount Street Bridge. The British soldiers were the last of the Great War volunteers, who joined up together to fight the Germans. They knew that there was a strong chance they would die in France, but to die in Dublin would never have crossed their minds. The Irish Volunteers were weekend warriors many of whom had no idea they were about to take part in large scale battles on the streets of Dublin.
A Terrible Beauty
2013
Vinny and Lauryn fall for each other but their future together is threatened by their present.
Wastewater
2019