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Outlook: The actor who’s been saying the same lines for 32 years

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Perfect Crime - Shir Stein

15/10/2020 GMT

The actor who’s been saying the same lines for 32 years

BBC World Service - Outlook, The actor who’s been saying the same lines for 32 years

Catherine Russell has played the same part more than 13,000 times – without a sick day

Catherine Russell has played the same part more than 13,000 times – without a sick day.

Groundhog Day... deja vu... are phrases that tend to have negative connotations. Repetition is often equated with monotony. Not so for Catherine Russell. She holds the world record for the most theatre performances in the same role and she wouldn't have it any other way. For the past 32 years she has been playing the role of Margaret Thorne Brent - a psychiatrist who might also be a cold-blooded killer in the long running off-Broadway play Perfect Crime. 

Just two months after Cristina Zamora had given birth to her baby daughter in 1974, she was taken by Augusto Pinochet's security forces and thrown in jail where she found a creative way to cope. Embroidery, knitting clothes and stitching tiny love letters helped political prisoners like Cristina to survive. Afterwards, Cristina didn't discuss her nightmarish experience but over 40 years later when her daughter, Jimena Pardo, saw the prison crafts in an exhibition, Jimena plucked up the courage to ask her mother about her early life. Determined that the horrors of the dictatorship should not be forgotten, Jimena set up a sewing project called Bordando por la Memoria (Embroidering Memory).


(Photo: Catherine Russell in Perfect Crime. Credit: Shir Stein)

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