Bodyguard star to be honoured in Glasgow

Bodyguard’s Richard Madden, celebrated soprano and a West End designer are to be honoured by Scotland’s national conservatoire.

Actor Richard Madden, lighting designer Paule Constable and soprano Margaret Marshall OBE will receive the honours as part of the Conservatoire’s summer graduation on Thursday, July 4. The trio will join more than 300 graduands who will graduate across the disciplines of music, drama, dance, production, Education and film.

Professor Jeffrey Sharkey, principal of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, said: ‘Graduation is a wonderful opportunity to recognise and celebrate inspirational individuals who have made deep and lasting contributions to the world through the arts.

‘Richard, Paule and Margaret have all demonstrated an exceptional ability to inspire and engage audiences through their artistry and we are delighted to be able to honour them while we celebrate our students’ achievements on their special occasion here at Scotland’s national conservatoire.’

Actor Richard Madden, from Elderslie in Renfrewshire, will be honoured for his contribution to drama. Richard, who graduated from the Royal Conservatoire in 2007, won Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series – Drama for his role in the BBC series Bodyguard at this year’s Golden Globes. He was recently named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine.

Richard hits the big screen next month (May) in the Elton John biopic Rocketman, playing music manager John Reid. He will also appear in World War One drama 1917 with Benedict Cumberbatch, Colin Firth and Mark Strong which is released later this year. The film is written by Sam Mendes and Krysty Wilson-Cairns, a Royal Conservatoire graduate.

An honorary degree will also be bestowed upon lighting luminary Paule Constable whose creative vision has illuminated stages all over the world, from London’s West End to Broadway.

Paule is Associate Director of the National Theatre and an Associate of the Lyric Hammersmith and for Matthew Bourne’s New Adventures. She has four Laurence Olivier Awards for Lighting Design for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, The Chalk Garden, Don Carlos and His Dark Materials. She has won two Tony Awards for lighting design for War Horse and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

She has received three Critics Circle Awards in LA and two in New York along with two Drama Desk Awards. She received the Hospital Award for contribution to theatre and was the first recipient of the Opera Award for Lighting in 2013. Paule has also received the Knight of Illumination Award three times.

An honorary degree will also be presented to Stirling-born soprano, Margaret Marshall OBE. Margaret, a graduate of what was the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, rose to international prominence when she won first prize at the Munich International Competition.

She made her London debut at the Wigmore Hall the following year. Her operatic debut came in Florence in 1978, under the conductor Riccardo Muti. She was particularly noted for her interpretation of Mozartian roles which she sang in many of the world’s leading opera houses including the Royal Opera House in London, La Scala in Milan, Vienna’s Wiener Staatsoper and the Salzburg Festival.

Margaret was also a prolific concert singer with a broad repertoire ranging from Bach to Britten, appearing with many of the world’s most renowned orchestras including the Berlin Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic, the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra, the Academy of St Martin in the Fields and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra.

She performed with conductors Claudio Abbado, Riccardo Muti, Sir Neville Marriner, John Eliot Gardiner, Bernard Haitink and Sir Alexander Gibson. Her recordings include Bach’s Mass in B Minor with Sir Neville Marriner, Handel’s Messiah with John Eliot Gardiner, Così fan tutte with Riccardo Muti and Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater with Claudio Abbado.

The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland is consistently recognised as one of the world’s top performing arts education institutions (QS World University Rankings) endorsing its status as a national and international centre of excellence for the performing arts.

Located in the heart of Glasgow, the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland is also a busy performing arts venue; it hosts more than 600 public performances each year and welcomes an audience of more than 50,000 annually.