Award winning South African actress and audiobooks performer Bianca Amato who is popularly known for her role of Philippa De Villiers in the original cast of the South African soap opera Isidingo. She was born in Cape Town, South Africa and graduated from the University of Cape Town. She emigrated to the United States and was granted a United States Permanent Resident Card as an “Alien of Extraordinary Ability” in the arts in 2002.
She appeared in a 2002 episode of the HBO series Sex and the City and also played several leading roles with the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota between 2003 and 2005. Since 2009 Amato has guest starred in several U.S. TV series. Amato portrays Delia Alexander in the PlayStation Network series Powers, which premiered on March 10, 2015.
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Amato has also appeared in the original Broadway production of Tom Stoppard’s Tony Award-winning trio of plays The Coast of Utopia as well as the Broadway revival of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. She also understudied the roles of Hannah Jarvis and Lady Croom in the 2011 Broadway revival of Stoppard’s Arcadia. Off-Broadway, Amato has appeared in Bill Irwin’s Mr. Fox: A Rumination (2004), and as Emma in Trumpery (2007). She later costarred as Calantha in The Broken Heart in 2012, and played the leading role of Olga Knipper in Neva in 2013.
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She equally starred as Amanda in a production of Noël Coward’s Private Lives and in 2014 she portrayed Regan in the Theatre for a New Audience production of King Lear in New York. Amato has narrated over 40 audiobooks, including Philippa Gregory’s entire Cousins’ War series of historical novels and Charles Stross’ 2008 Hugo Award-nominated science fiction novel Saturn’s Children. She also voiced the 2006 gothic novel The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield, which had risen to No. 1 on The New York Times Best Seller list in its second week of publication.
Amato won the Vita Award for Best Newcomer for Under Milk Wood and the Fleur du Cap Theatre Award for Best Supporting Actress for Greek, both performed at the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town, South Africa. She earned an Avante Award for Best Actress in a Television Series for her role on the series Isidingo and a Duku Duku Award for South Africa’s Most Popular Actress. She later won the Star Tribune Award for best performance of 2004 for playing Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She also won an Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Actress in 2013 and the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Emery Battis Award in 2014.
Amato has received nine AudioFile Earphones Awards and two Audie Awards for her audiobook performances.
