Harriet Walters is Speaking for Free at Yale’s Elizabethan Club Nov. 19!

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Dame Harriet Walter’s at Yale Nov. 19, delivering the prestigious Maynard Mack Lecture at the behest of the university’s Elizabeth Club. The lecture won’t actually be a the Elizabethan Club. It’ll be held in room 102 of Linsly-Chittenden Hall, at 63 High Street on Yale’s New Haven campus. The talk starts at 5:15 p.m. and is open to the general public.

Walter has a prepared speech about women in society and particularly about women in theater, titled “A Serious Job for a Woman?” It’s a centuries-spanning historical overview from the British stage veteran whose credits include Viola in the 1987 Royal Shakespeare production of Twelfth Night directed by Bill Alexander, the National Theatre’s 1993 premiere of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, the Donmar Warehouse’s rendition of Friedrich Schiller’s Mary Stuart (as Elizabeth I) in 2005 and a host of other hot tickets. Last year Walter played Brutus in an all-female Donmar Warehouse production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, directed by Phylida Lloyd. She’s done over a dozen movies (from Sense & Sensibility to Babel to A Royal Affaire) and lots of TV (from Dickens and Chekhov adaptations to the requisite crime shows Law & Orders and Midsomer Murders).

Not enough for you? OK, she’s Lady Shackleton on the current season of Downton Abbey.

Coolest behind-the-scenes credit: Walter is a longtime patron of the British theater company Clean Break, which develops theater projects for and with incarcerated women.

She was awarded the Dame title three years ago. She’s written and spoken extensively on the role of women in the history of theater. A Yale Elizabethan talk by her is a big, dramatic, progressive, feminist celebrity deal.