RAY FUNK
MARTINA LAIRD is a very busy and extremely versatile actor, moving from film and television to London theatre and voice work that recently has taken her all over Europe.
She was a star in the live action film of The Little Mermaid, and on the Hallmark channel in a remake of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, which was filmed last year in Bulgaria and Ireland and released in February.
Daughter of architect Colin Laird and sister of Banyan producer Christopher Laird, Martina grew up in a home where her parents were ardent supporters of the arts, and especial Beryl McBurnie and the Little Carib Theatre.
[caption id="attachment_1093284" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Martina Laird in a scene as Mrs Jennings in Sense and Sensibility. -[/caption]
“My dad helped Beryl put together the first building that was the Little Carib, and both my parents were involved in those early days. My mother talked about selling tickets outside the Little Carib back in the day, and when they would run out of tickets, Beryl would just write more and just everybody would go in!”
At 13, Laird appeared in Epiphany, a Banyan television series, with Tony Hall, Christopher Pinheiro, Joanne Kilgour and Wilbert Holder. She recalled it meant at an early age she had to learn about camera angles and different aspects of television production.
Derek Walcott was also very much part of her early years, and she grew up watching plays at the Little Carib.
She told journalist Tamika Mitchell last year for the online British Blacklist, “I remember going to see Norman Beaton and Barbara Assoon in Derek Walcott’s Remembrance…
“It was when I was making the decision to commit to the life of an actor. I saw that production and thought, ‘Yes, I want to be able to do that.’
“I was friends with Anna Walcott when we were both part of Rounders Children’s Theatre, which became Lilliput. This was founded by Tony Hall and Noble Douglas, who had both recently returned to TT after studying abroad. This meant we had a great foundation in acting and in dance.
"We were both in the production of Cinderella Strikes Again that I wrote, with Tony and Noble’s encouragement. It was a Trinidadian take on all the fairytales and nursery rhymes we were brought up on as kids."
Encouraged by Walcott, Laird went to the University of Kent at Canterbury, originally to study French, but switched to drama and started a broader theatrical career. At university, she was excited by all the theatre available to her and got caught up in “all the productions I could take part in” as an actor. After college, she got into drama school, attending Webber Douglas Academy in London.
She has been in a number of feature films, including as a forensic officer in the Jason Statham thriller Blitz (2011), a doctor in Forget Me Not (2010), detective in Deadmeat (2007) and a coach in Fedz (2013).
But none was as big a box-office success as the Walt Disney live action version of The Little Mermaid released last year, in which she played Lashana, a maid in the castle.
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