Steinunn Ólína Þorsteinsdóttir

Steinunn Olina is a famous Icelandic actress, writer and producer who has enjoyed an illustrious career, once depicted by critics as one of the most remarkable and versatile talent of her generation in her native country Iceland, a career lasting over two decades now which was initiated with a unique start when she landed a starring role on stage, long before attending drama school, racking up her celebrity status in Iceland at the age of fifteen

Steinunn Olina was born in Reykjavík 1969 where she grew up with her mother, an actress and her father, a writer and translator of dramatic literature. When she was seventeen she moved to London England where she studied drama under the mentoring of Yat Malgren and Christopher Fettes at the Drama Centre in London, from which she graduated in 1900, along with such talents as Helen McRory and Tara Fitzgerald, subsequently moving back to Iceland to re-launch a career on the stage and television as a mature artist, making her debut at the The National Theatre of Iceland in the role of Solveig in Henriks Ibsens Peer Gynt.

Eventually Steinunn Olina was hired as a contracted star player at the National Theatre where she spent the next fourteen years, appearing in over 50 productions, portraying diversity of leading characters in contemporary and classical plays a like. Her many significant roles at the National include Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady by Lerner and Loewe and Hodel in Fiddler on the Roof, also contributing to several stage productions of comedy and farce, such Ray Cooney’s Two for One and in Michael Fryans Noises Off as the misfortunate actress Dotty Otley. She has also interpreted many classical characters such as Irena, in Chekhov’s Three Sisters, Aglaja in a dramatization of The Idiot by Dostoyevsky and Queen Margaret in Shakespeare’s Richard III for which she garnered the prestigious “Grima awards” (The Mask) in 2004. [[1]]

Steinunn Olina has also been featured in numerous high profile stage productions with several different acting companies, tackling leading roles in plays by masters of the absurd such as in Ioensco´s The Lesson, her portrayal of Roxy Hart in Chicago by Kander and Ebb as a guest star with the Reykjavík Theatre Ensamble.

Steinunn Olina is also a celebrated artist in many other diverse topographies of her wide range of artistic and creative prowess which was certainly most evident when she, much to the surprise of her many fans, plunged into the territory of Talk Shows and became one of the most popular and controversial host of a television comedy talk show in the history of Icelandic broadcasting, producing, writing, directing and hosting her own live show “Over my dead body - with Steinunn Olina” on the Icelandic State Broadcasting Television Channel 1. Biography written by Gilli Steinunn Olina has also contributed generously to other television shows as a star comedienne and writer, such as the RUV-TV´s “New Years Eve Comedy Hour Variety Show” the most pre=eminent annual event on National Television in Iceland, to which she has famously rendered her services on several occasions. Steinunn has also appeared in handful of television plays, sitcoms and feature films, including Beowulf and Grendel, starring Gerald Butler in 2005.

As an artist of extraordinary merit and ability Steinunn Olina made a considerable turnabout, with regard to her writing material, when she broke in to the stratum of novelists with the publishing of her semi-autobiographical novella “Parental Guidance” which made number one bestseller in Iceland 2006. Steinunn Olina´s career and her offerings to theatre, film, and television continues to soar and in 2004 she moved to the United States, currently residing in California where she has further supplemented to her writing and producing along with her actor husband Stefán_Karl_Stefánsson of the Lazy Town fame. The happy couple is raising three little girls and expecting their fourth child in May 2008.