Maggie Lunn


Maggie Lunn was an English casting director, for leading theatre companies and for notable productions on television and film.

Life

Lunn was born in Jesmond, Newcastle upon Tyne, youngest of four children born to John Lunn, a school teacher, and Norah Lunn. She attended Sacred Heart Grammar School in Fenham, and read English at Newcastle University. Starting a career in journalism, she was a research assistant, at The Daily Telegraph and then at Private Eye.
Moving to casting in 1987, she was an assistant to the casting director Gill Titchmarsh, and later an agent at International Creative Management. In 1995 she was appointed head of casting at the Royal Shakespeare Company. In 2002, she joined Michael Attenborough at the Almeida Theatre as artistic associate. From 2001 to 2002 she was acting head of casting at the Royal National Theatre. With the Royal Shakespeare Company and later, she was interested in casting black and minority ethnic actors in roles usually regarded as white, notably David Oyelowo as the king in Shakespeare's Henry VI, at the RSC in 2001.
She then became a freelance casting director and worked on TV as well as theatrical productions. This included the production of The Rivals at Bristol Old Vic in 2016 where the cast she put together was part of the success of the production. She worked with other theatre companies including the Young Vic, the Old Vic and the Chichester Festival Theatre.
Her casting decisions were influential at the start of the careers of several including David Oyelowo, Benedict Cumberbatch, Ben Whishaw, Alex Jennings, Eddie Redmayne, Eve Best, Rory Kinnear and Lucian Msamati.
On television, she was casting director for productions including Pride and Prejudice, Cranford and Great Expectations. In film, productions included Carrington, Notes on a Scandal and Broken.
Maggie Lunn died of cancer in 2017, aged 56, survived by her husband, the actor Paul Jesson, and daughter Joanne from an earlier relationship. The director Rufus Norris, with whom she worked at the Almeida Theatre and later, said "To work with her was to enter a cauldron of robust and rigorous inquiry".

Theatre

She was nominated for one Primetime Emmy in 2007 for Cranford in the category of the casting of a miniseries, movie or a special.