Shakespeare & Company to Honor Annette Miller And John Douglas Thompson

Shakespeare & Company will present its Gala 2025, slated for Saturday, June 28, which will honor award-winning actors Annette Miller and John Douglas Thompson.

In addition to performing on its stages - including together in Richard III in 2010 - both actors are alumni of Shakespeare & Company's Center for Actor Training, which offers acting intensives and workshops for artists at varied stages in their careers and provides the basis for the company's aesthetic.

Bev Hyman, chair of Shakespeare & Company's Board of Trustees, said Miller and Thompson's bodies of work - at once prolific, diverse, and acclaimed - exemplify the Center for Actor Training's focus on training the voice and body, but also imagination, intellect, and emotion.

"Seeing Annette or John perform is enough to help any theatergoer understand what's unique about Shakespeare & Company's Center for Actor Training," she said. "The actor's ability to connect with the audience, to speak what they feel, and, above all, to make every word accessible, separates this training from the rest."

Miller, a leading actor at Shakespeare & Company for more than 25 seasons, has performed on Broadway, Off-Broadway, in Boston, in regional theaters, on television, and in film.

Among many other roles, she's appeared as publisher Mrs. Tanken in the Oscar-nominated film Don't Look Up alongside Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, and on television in recurring roles on As the World Turns and Ryan's Hope. Just last year, she earned a Special Citation for a Lifetime of Defining Performances from the Boston Theater Critics Association.

Miller has garnered numerous awards for her work at Shakespeare & Company alone, including the Elliot Norton Best Actor Award and the Independent Reviewers of New England Best Actor Award for her performance as Golda Meir in Golda's Balcony in 2002 - a role she originated. In 2023 and 2024, Miller reprised her Golda's Balcony performance with Shakespeare & Company at its Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre and again at Boston's Emerson Paramount Center. This season, she features in the Company's World Premiere of Lawrence Goodman's The Victim.

A Tony Award nominee for August Wilson's Jitney, Thompson's acting career began in New England, including roles with Shakespeare & Company. In 2005, he made his Broadway debut as Flavius in Julius Caesar with Denzel Washington and went on to play Le Bret in the 2007 Broadway production of Cyrano de Bergerac alongside Jennifer Garner and Kevin Kline.

He plays opposite Washington again in the upcoming film Highest 2 Lowest directed by Spike Lee, and currently portrays Arthur Scott on HBO's The Gilded Age, for which he was nominated for a Screen Actors' Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series.

Thompson has won three Obie Awards, three Drama Desk Awards, three Elliot Norton Awards, one Outer Critics Award, a Lucille Lortel Award, an NAACP Award, and many other accolades for his stage performances. In 2024, he made his Royal Shakespeare Company debut in the titular of Othello - a role he's played several times, including at Shakespeare & Company in 2009. He'll appear this year in Shakespeare & Company's Jewish Play Festival on Sunday, Oct. 12, as part of a reading of Roz & Ray by Karen Hartman.

Shakespeare & Company's Gala 2025 will be held at its campus in Lenox, Mass., in the Berkshires of Massachusetts, and include a cocktail hour, performance, dinner by The Old Inn On The Green, and dancing with DJ Justin Allen. Proceeds benefit Shakespeare & Company's Center for Actor Training, Education Program, and Performances.

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