Shannon Eubanks(I)

Shannon Eubanks is a 50-year film, TV and theater actress and stage director, who's enjoying a career playing the antitheses of the typical "lady next door." Lucky enough to catch the last great wave of classical repertory in the U.S., she's often played eight different characters a week in companies from Alaska to Florida, including years with Los Angeles' Shakespeare Society of America under the artistic directorship of DeVeren Bookwalter, alongside talents like Annie Potts, John Savage, and William Frankfather. It was an era in the 70's when performing arts immediately preceded sports on the local TV news in L.A., and Shannon was lucky enough early in her career to draw the attention of the top industry publications, among them VARIETY : "Eubanks is wonderful...amazingly crisp yet able to bring off delicate nuance", THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER: "Eubanks excels...further establishing herself as one of L.A. theatre's finest performers", and the L.A.TIMES: "Shannon Eubanks is back to direct a taut, vigorous and vital production, riddled with wit and spattered with blood". Shannon's path in performing arts started with a dare. She was a premed student when a classmate challenged her to audition for a role at the college theater with a revered director. Eubanks took the dare and was cast in her first production of Chekhov, as Sonja in UNCLE VANYA, after which she pursued a dual major in both pre-med and theatre arts. In the end it was a faculty adviser that helped tip the scales in favor of acting, suggesting to Shannon that she would be able to explore many varied interests through the performing arts, whereas medicine would be an intense focus on a singular discipline. Her repertory experience - the gift of inhabiting creations of Shakespeare, Ibsen, Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Tennessee Williams, and other greats - which is so hard to come by for today's American professionals, has led to her ability to disappear into personalities as diverse as the elegant frost of doyenne Amanda Cathcart in NBC's Margaret Mitchell: A Burning Passion, the hilariously unsuccessful sexual repression of moral crusader Helen Hunter in ABC Family's comedy Pop Rocks, or the melancholy grace of Ann Alden Forbes on ABC's daytime serial Loving, which prompted a New York Times review to call her "the cream of the crop...Eubanks is smashing as Roger's betrayed and bitter wife Ann". Vamp fans may know her opposite the wonderful cast of the CW's The Originals, as the eerie, smoky-voiced witch Bastianna Natale. Now living in Atlanta, Shannon is profoundly grateful to be able to cycle back and forth from camera to stage and back again. What began as a career choice has become a life path, with the singular mission of telling the truth about the human condition - one story at a time.