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Kate Mulgrew Calls Faye Dunaway Broadway Firing a ‘Sadness All the Way Around’

Kate Mulgrew. Photo: Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images for Netflix

There’s no drama quite like Broadway drama. Faye Dunaway’s journey in the lead role of Katharine Hepburn in the play Tea at Five came to a halt a few days after the show’s run in Boston, when she was fired from the production. A Post report cited lateness and general bad, “hostile” behavior as the reason. Possibly the absolute least hostile reaction to the news came from Kate Mulgrew, for whom the Tea at Five role was originally written (she performed the one-woman-show in 2002). “That’s too bad, isn’t it? Just too bad,” said Mulgrew at the premiere of season seven of Orange Is the New Black. “I don’t think anybody wants that to happen to them, least of all an actress of her stature. I think it’s just a sadness all the way around. I’m profoundly sorry.”

Mulgrew is also sad to be leaving her role as Galina “Red” Reznikov on OITNB. “I’m going to miss waiting for the script to come and my doorman handing it to me and trying to be polite to the doorman and then wanting to run upstairs and rip it open,” says Mulgrew. Other things she’ll miss? Basically, everything: her Russian lessons (effective!), her character, and the sharp writing. Most of all, she’ll miss her pals. “Walking on the set … That wonderful frisson I used to feel with Natasha and Tay and Dale, whoever I was working with, this melting pot of actors. This is unlikely to happen to me again. So I’ve been a lucky girl.”

Kate Mulgrew Calls Faye Dunaway Broadway Firing a ‘Sadness’