Olwen Fouéré is an actress and writer/director from Ireland. She was born in Galway on 2 March 1954. Her parents, Yann Fouéré and Marie-Magdeleine Mauger, are from Brittany.
In 2020, The Irish Times ranked her as the 22nd greatest film actor in Ireland.
In theater, Fouéré works as a freelance actress internationally, performing in both English and French. She has appeared in various theaters, including the Abbey Theatre and the Gate Theatre in Ireland, the Royal National Theatre in England, the Bouffes du Nord in Paris, the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York, the Sydney Theatre Company in Australia, and the Shakespeare Theatre Company in DC.
In 1980, she co-founded Operating Theatre, an avant-garde theater company, with composer Roger Doyle. Later, she created TheEmergencyRoom, an artistic entity for developing her ongoing projects. Some of her notable works include RIVERRUN (based on James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake), Lessness by Samuel Beckett, Danse, Morob (written by French writer Laurent Gaudé), and Sodome, My Love (in collaboration with Rough Magic, also by Laurent Gaudé). She has also worked on a film project titled Cassandra: fragments of a playscript, co-directed by Kevin Abosch from a script by Anne Enright.