Actors Inta Tirole and Juris Bartkevičs to receive Latvia's top theatre lifetime award

Actress Inta Tirole and actor Juris Bartkevičs will receive this year's lifetime achievement award at Spēlmaņu nakts, Latvia's national theatre awards. The winners were announced on the morning programme of LTV, Latvian public television, by Ojārs Rubenis, chairman of the board of the Latvian Theatre Workers' Union (LTDS), LSM reported.

The 33rd Spēlmaņu nakts, honouring the 2025/26 theatre season, will be held at the Dailes Theatre in Riga on 23 November. The LTDS organises the ceremony with support from the Ministry of Culture, the Boris and Ināra Teterev Foundation and Riga City Council.

Inta Tirole: 66 years at the National Theatre

Inta Tirole joined the Latvian National Theatre in 1960, straight after graduating from drama school, and is now the oldest working actress in Latvian theatre. On the main stage she has mostly played character parts and comic roles, while in the studio stage she has created several one-woman shows, some on her own initiative, among them Shirley Valentine.

She recently appeared in Ināra Slucka's production of All About Eve. Colleagues describe her creative energy as childlike playfulness, curiosity and joy of life, and she calls herself an incorrigible optimist.

Juris Bartkevičs: from Liepāja to Rothko

Juris Bartkevičs was born in Talsi and was an actor at the Liepāja Theatre from 1970 to 2004, becoming one of director Oļģerts Kroders's leading actors. In Kroders's productions he played both Hamlet and Claudius, Trigorin in The Seagull and Peer Gynt. He was the theatre's artistic director from 1996 to 2004 and initiated a rock opera staged there in 1999.

Bartkevičs has been with the Dailes Theatre since 2004. His roles there include Sigmund Freud, the poet Andrejs Pumpurs and the painter Mark Rothko in Łukasz Twarkowski's Rothko, one of the most widely seen Latvian productions abroad. He has won several Spēlmaņu nakts awards and holds the Order of the Three Stars (2020).