Caitlin Fitzgerald Biography

Caitlin Fitzgerald is an American actress and filmmaker.

Early life

Fitzgerald was raised in Camden, Maine. Her father, Des FitzGerald, is the founder of Ducktrap River Fish Farm Inc. and the former CEO of the multinational corporation ContiGroup. Her mother, Pam Allen, is the author of Knitting for Dummies and the founder of the yarn company Quince & Co. Fitzgerald's younger brother, Ryan, is a Yale University graduate with a master's degree in environmental management. Her parents divorced when she was a child. She has two half-brothers, Alexander and Cooper, as a result of her father's subsequent marriage to Lucinda Ziesing. Her paternal grandfather, Desmond Fitzgerald, was the deputy director of the CIA during the Kennedy administration. Her aunt is Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Frances FitzGerald.

Fitzgerald first developed an interest in acting as a child and performed in many community theatre and school productions. She was a boarding student at Concord Academy in Massachusetts. She later graduated from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, where she studied drama at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting. She also spent time at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. While auditioning for acting roles, Fitzgerald has worked retail and catering jobs.

Career

Fitzgerald has appeared in Love Simple, It's Complicated, Gossip Girl, Whit Stillman's Damsels in Distress Newlyweds and Masters of Sex.

In 2010, Fitzgerald starred in an off-Broadway production of Hedda Gabler. The play was performed in a private house to an audience of just twenty-five people. Fitzgerald was excited to play "the greatest part written for a woman that isn't Shakespeare." Ben Brantley of The New York Times said of her performance: "All legs, eyes and cheekbones, with a face that seems made for cinematic close-ups, she's a hypnotic pleasure to look at." However, he felt she had insufficient gravitas, often bringing to mind "a newly transferred, intimidatingly classy high school senior, perhaps, who is so beyond being merely popular."

In 2012, Fitzgerald starred in and co-wrote the screenplay for the independent film Like the Water, set in Maine. The film focuses on the death of a childhood friend, inspired by the sudden death of Fitzgerald's Riley School classmate Sabrina Seelig.

Personal life

Fitzgerald is in a relationship with Welsh actor Michael Sheen.