September 28, 1938 – January 9, 2026
Tina Packer, acclaimed actor, director, writer, teacher, and founding artistic director of Shakespeare & Company – passed away on Friday, Jan. 9, 2026, at the age of 87, surrounded by her son, Martin, and close friends. A Celebration of Life will be held Sunday, May 31, 2026, at 1 p.m. on the Shakespeare & Company campus in Lenox, Mass.
Born Sept. 28, 1938, in Wolverhampton, England, and raised in Nottingham, Tina trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, graduating in 1964 with honors and the Ronson Award for Most Promising Actress. She performed as an Associate Artist at the Royal Shakespeare Company and appeared in BBC and ITV productions including David Copperfield and Doctor Who, as well as the 1967 film Two a Penny. She later moved into directing and teaching, and after a Ford Foundation grant to research the roots of Shakespeare’s plays, traveled to India, Israel, Italy, and the United States.
There, she co-founded Shakespeare & Company in 1978 in the Berkshires of Massachusetts with actor and director Dennis Krausnick (1942–2018), who later became her husband; voice and text teacher Kristin Linklater (1936–2020); and a cadre of theater artists, first based at The Mount, Edith Wharton’s home in Lenox. Tina and Kristin went on to start the Company’s Training Program, now the Center for Actor Training – built around the voice, body, mind, soul, and spirit, which became Tina’s pride and joy and grew into an internationally acclaimed program.
Tina served as artistic director until 2009, after which she focused on directing and teaching while continuing to act, including in Shirley Valentine, Molly Ivins: Red Hot Patriot, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, and Mother of the Maid. She played Edith Wharton several times, along with Shakespeare’s Volumnia, Gertrude, and Cleopatra. In all, Tina acted in eight of Shakespeare’s plays – never when directing, she was sure to note – and directed all 37, many multiple times, both at Shakespeare & Company and at venues including Portland Playhouse, Boston’s Actors’ Shakespeare Project, Prague Shakespeare, and the American Shakespeare Center.
A dedicated teacher, Tina taught the Shakespeare canon at more than 30 colleges and universities, including Harvard, MIT, and NYU, and taught for four years in Columbia’s MBA program, where she co-authored Power Plays: Shakespeare’s Lessons in Leadership and Management with Professor John O. Whitney. Her other books include the children’s title Tales from Shakespeare and Shakespeare & Company: When Action Is Eloquence, co-written with Bella Merlin.
Her best-known book, Women of Will (Knopf, 2015), was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice. It grew from a solo performance project, portraying every female role in Shakespeare’s plays alongside short lectures, that she toured internationally starting in 1994 with Guggenheim and Bunting Fellowship support. Thirty years later, the Women of Will Directing Fellowship was created in her honor to support early-career women directors passionate about Shakespeare.
Tina was also the subject of several books and documentaries, including The Company She Keeps: Tina Packer Builds a Theater by Helen Epstein and the WGBH documentary Sex, Violence and Poetry: A Portrait of Tina Packer. In 2024, she became the first woman profiled in Bloomsbury Arden’s Shakespeare in the Theatre series, with Shakespeare in the Theatre: Tina Packer by Katharine Goodland.
She received six honorary degrees and numerous awards over her six-decade career, including the Shakespeare Theatre Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award, the American Shakespeare Center’s Burbage Award, the Elliot Norton Award for Lifetime Achievement, and the Commonwealth Award for the Arts, Massachusetts’ highest cultural honor.
Tina is survived by her son, Martin Jason Asprey, and extended family, including brothers Julian and Nicholas Packer. Shakespeare & Company Artistic Director Allyn Burrows described her as “a fiery force of nature with an indomitable spirit,” whose warmth, generosity, wit, and insatiable curiosity touched everyone she encountered.