Kate Fleetwood

Hometown: A farm near Stratford-upon-Avon, England. "The Forest of Arden, where I grew up, is where As You Like It is set. It was idyllic."

Currently: Making her Broadway debut as the eerily mad Lady Macbeth opposite Patrick Stewart in Macbeth.

To Audition or Not to Audition? She initially didn't want to do it: Fleetwood auditioned for the role of Lady Macbeth, but not without reservations. Already juggling two plays, she was a new mother to Raphael, now two and a half and felt "anxious that I was taking on too much." The casting director had her on the list, but director Rupert Goold—who is also Fleetwood's husband—"felt like he didn't want to be the only person suggesting me," she recalls. It wasn't long until Patrick Stewart brought her name up, having no idea that she and Goold were married. "Why aren't we meeting Kate Fleetwood?" asked Stewart. "Because she's my wife," Goold replied. "Well," said Stewart, "that shouldn't get in the way." After a week of getting familiar with the text, Fleetwood came in for a meeting. "Patrick would say it wasn't an audition, but it felt like an audition to me," the actress recalls.

She's Bloody Mad! After Macbeth murders the king, he comes on stage holding a knife, his hands covered in bright blood. But Lady Macbeth isn't satisfied. She wants to frame the king's servants by smearing them with the evidence. "We had a doctor come and talk to us," Fleetwood says, "and we asked him, 'By the by, how do you get blood from a dead body?' Once the body is dead, the blood ceases to run. The doctor said the only place to get blood to spew out of a dead body is the groin. So when I go backstage and I'm being smothered in this blood, that's what I'm picturing, that she's gone crazy. That's why I've got so much blood on me. People are shocked when they see it!" You could even say that mania runs in her blood. Fleetwood's first big role was the Jailer's Daughter in The Two Noble Kinsmen. "She goes mad," the actress says of the character. "I do quite a lot of mad," she adds, laughing.

A Man with Experience: Goold's Macbeth combines the look and feel of Stalinist Russia with the aesthetic of horror films like the The Shining and Saw. And the relationship between Macbeth and his Lady is also anything but typical: Patrick Stewart is nearly twice Fleetwood's age—67 to her 35—but that's part of the story. Stewart plays a military commander "who may have already had his time in the sun, and this is his last real chance," says Fleetwood. "And, of course, the idea is that a young wife, a trophy wife, is triggering these ambitions for him. She has obviously spent her whole life surrounded by men, but she knows how to deal with them." Stewart, who made his theatrical debut almost 50 years ago in As You Like It, offered simple words of wisdom to his leading lady. "Whenever I felt nervous before a big opening, I liked to remember something he said to me: 'Oooh! Don't ever be frightened!'—like it was a really odd suggestion that one be frightened. I suppose age and experience give you that."

Kiss Your Dreams Hello: Raised on a big farm two miles outside Stratford-upon-Avon, Fleetwood says, "I used to help with the milking and all that—hay-baling and wild-oating. I was a real country girl." Of course, the Bard's hometown also boasted the Royal Shakespeare Company's world-class theater complex. "My parents are not theatrical people, but my dad took me to the theater," Fleetwood recalls. "It was a really, really famous production of The Taming of the Shrew with Jonathan Pryce. He came through the audience with the houselights on and told the actor playing Christopher Sly to pull all the scenery down. And my dad thought, 'Oh my god, what have I brought my children to?' My sister and I said, 'Don't worry, it's part of the play,' because kids understand this kind of thing." By the time the lights went down, young Kate decided, "That's what I'd like to do." And she did. By age 11, she was acting at the RSC. "If you hear the language again and again, night after night, as a youngster, it gets into your bloodstream," she says. Appropriately enough, Fleetwood got together with Goold a decade ago after he directed her starring performance in Romeo and Juliet.

You're on Broadway, Lady! Now playing Lady M in her fourth theater—the production began at the 300-seat Chichester Festival Theatre, then went on to acclaim in the West End before a six-week run at BAM and a final move to the Lyceum—Fleetwood calls her Broadway debut "an extraordinary, once-in-a-lifetime thing. The first preview on Broadway was really exciting. And I love the Lyceum—it's a beautiful place to play." But having little "Raphie" as she calls her toddler son in New York ensures that she doesn't bring the part home. "I'm up at seven in the morning dealing out the Cheerios," she says with a laugh. "I don't have the time or the energy to wallow in the misery of Lady Macbeth."