Eva Birthistle (born 16 April 1974 in Bray) is an Irish actress, screenwriter and director. She gained international attention for her role in Ken Loach's Ae Fond Kiss...; He reached large audiences on television with the TV series The Last Kingdom and Bad Sisters.
Career
Born in Bray, County Wicklow, he received his acting training at the Gaiety School of Acting in Dublin. She made her screen debut as Regina Crosbie in the Irish TV series Glenroe in 1995 and continued in this role until 1998. In the same years, he also stepped into cinema with films such as All Souls' Day and Drinking Crude.
Her breakthrough came in 2004: She played Roisin Hanlon, a music teacher at a Catholic school in Glasgow, in Ae Fond Kiss..., for which she received the London Film Critics Circle's British/Irish Actress of the Year award. In the following period, he appeared in films such as Breakfast on Pluto (2005), Imagine Me & You (2005), Brooklyn (2015) and The Delinquent Season (2018). She has twice won the Irish Film and Television Academy's (IFTA) award for best actress in cinema.
On television, she played Jane Lavery in the political thriller series The State Within (2006) and Sarah Cavendish in the final season of Waking the Dead. She took on the role of Hild in the historical drama The Last Kingdom (2015-2022); She played Ursula Flynn, one of the five sisters, in the black comedy Bad Sisters, which started in 2022.
Birthistle, who also went behind the camera, started directing with the short film Kathleen Was Here in 2020. The feature film Kathleen Is Here, which she wrote and directed by expanding the same story, was completed in 2024 and was nominated in many categories at the 2025 IFTA awards.
