WRITTEN BY MARINA GOMBERG
To be a good performer is to be seen by others, and perhaps to be a great performer is to see others. From a tender age, Sarah Shippobotham has been observing the world around her in ways that have allowed her to absorb and replicate human natures with unique precision.
Growing up in the United Kingdom (Cardiff, Wales, at first and then Bristol, England from age 10 on), she could often be found playing with her sister or out on errands with her mum where she spoke exclusively — and quite believably! — like people from other places. Yorkshire, Glasgow, etc.
Shippobotham as Clairee in “Steel Magnolias” at Utah Shakespeare Festival.
Photo: Karl Hugh
Shippobotham as Williamina Fleming in Utah Shakespeare Festival’s “A Silent Sky”
Photo: Karl Hugh
In fact, if you had asked little Sarah then what acting was, she’d have said it was putting on an accent and taking a new shape. Perhaps that’s partly why, when asked to play a character for her third year in drama school that was too much like herself (Mariah in “The School for Scandal”), she thought the role was boring.
Turns out, it helps to know who you are to portray anyone else. Especially because acting isn’t about being fake; it’s about unearthing and accessing different truths on demand.
Being keenly self-deprecating, wildly interested in others, and in love with make-believe made Shippobotham the unassuming, world-renowned and celebrated professional in theatre and film that she is (she’ll politely ask me to cut this part; I’ll refuse).
It’s how she sees the world, and herself in it, that has manifested an empathetic, generous, observant, transformational (new EGOT?) actor, director, voice/dialect coach, and professor. That, and her brilliant time at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in Cardiff, and her time earning her postgraduate diploma in voice studies from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London.
What she learned, from whom and alongside whom, would launch her from playing character roles at the British Film Institute’s Museum of the Moving Image (she made an amazing Russian revolutionary) to working on “The Hobbit” trilogy, then the biggest movement of film people in history as they moved through New Zealand; in Canada’s Shaw Festival, the second largest repertory theatre company in North America; and the U’s esteemed Department of Theatre, working alongside U Distinguished Professor and Central alumna, Sandra Shotwell.
And she is now one of the legends University of Utah students get to claim as theirs.
What was interesting about talking to some of her current and former students was that while they each felt like their experience was transformative and personalized, they all shared — without prompt — their assumption that they weren’t alone in receiving such life-changing attention, care, and tailored support from Shippobotham.
Actor Training Program student Charley Holt, who with exuberant warmth rattled off the varied lessons and experiences Shippobotham provided her (reduce one’s ego, it’s called “company” for a reason, the whole body is the performative tool, be kind, etc.), acknowledged that Shippobotham’s reach extends beyond just the Actor Training Program. Holt said she “offers her knowledge whenever it’s requested. She truly goes above and beyond for us.”
CFA Distinguished Alumna Ashley Bryant Miller, who you may know from recent episodes of “Chicago Fire,” “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” or “FBI,” considers Shippobotham “an authentic, humble, sometimes self-deprecating instructor” who “brings her entire self to the room.”
Bryant Miller valued that when the class was learning European dialects, Shippobotham looked at her, a tenacious and talented Black woman, and offered to teach her a Nigerian dialect instead to better specialize what distinctive opportunities might come Bryan Miller’s way.
She sees students, their unique gifts, lived experiences, challenges, needs, and hopes with the same laser focus she’s long viewed the world, though with her students, instead of mimicking them, she helps them become the people of their dreams.
The fact that Shippobotham actively has worked locally and internationally as an actor, a voice/dialect coach or intimacy director while she risen through professorial ranks at the U, was a gift she shared, too.
When she was working on projects like the acclaimed and beloved one-woman show she wrote and starred in that premiered at Salt Lake Acting Company in 2023 called “Can I Say Yes to That Dress?” or any number of productions for Utah Shakespeare Company, and even some of her international voice and dialect coaching for the Shaw Festival, she took her students, sometimes literally, along for the journey. Oh, to have seen her as Lady Bracknell in “The Importance of Being Earnest” (2025), as Clairee in “Steel Magnolias” (2025), or her penultimate role (thus far, she says) as Williamina Fleming in “Silent Sky.” Pearls were undoubtedly clutched.
“Sarah kept learning and training, so we all learned to expect that in our professional careers as well,” Bryant Miller said. “Sarah struggled and triumphed through rehearsals and coaching sessions, living the life of a professional artist in front of us. That example is invaluable.”
Sarah Shippobotham is an astoundingly talented, rigorously trained, adoringly humble, brilliantly perceptive human whose gaze has manifested her into this iconic portrayer, purveyor, and professor in the worlds of theatre and acting.
To see her is to love her.
