Clare Higgins is one of Britain’s great stage actresses, winning three Olivier Awards.

This sketch is from her role in Wallace Shawn’s The Fever at the Royal Court Theatre in the Spring of 2009. She signed it for me at the National Theatre stage door in early 2011 where she was playing Gertrude, “a dipsomaniac in four inch heels” opposite Rory Kinnear‘s Hamlet.

Clare returns to the London stage as a recovering alcoholic in Jon Robin Baitz’s Other Desert Cities with Sinead Cusack which is currently in previews at the Old Vic