Biography

Kara was born in Glasgow and educated at Glasgow University where she graduated with an Honours Degree in Psychology. She started acting at university and virtually ran a small theatre company there, taking shows to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. On meeting her husband, Tom Conti, she moved to London to seek her fortune. Her first major job there was in ‘Boy Meets Girl’, a Scottish love story for BBC TV in which she starred opposite her husband. TV work included series such as ‘Mackenzie’, ‘Grange Hill’ and ‘Adam Smith’. On film she appeared in ‘Jane Eyre’, ‘Reuben, Reuben’ and ‘Heavenly Pursuits’. She has starred opposite her husband four times on stage in ‘Present Laughter’, ‘Otherwise Engaged’, ‘Chapter Two’ and ‘The Last of the Red Hot Lovers’. She appeared with her husband in a documentary on Charles Rennie Mackintosh for Channel Four.

When her daughter Nina was born, Kara concentrated more on her art and studied at Camden Arts Centre. Her passion was portraiture and in 1995 she had a major exhibition of her work at the Leith Gallery at the Edinburgh Festival, during which time she painted portraits daily in the gallery. Her association with the Leith Gallery started Kara’s new venture of writing plays on women painters for which she has become well known. Utilising her talents as writer, actress, painter and singer, she designed a format where she portrayed the artist in her studio while completing an oil painting in her style. An added plus was the selling of the painting to the audience

Her one-woman show, Glasgow Girl on Bessie MacNicol enjoyed a successful run at the Edinburgh Festival ‘97. The 1998 Edinburgh Festival show, Deco Diva, about the painter Tamara de Lempicka, proved even more popular with popular with audiences. In 2007 Bloomsbury Bell about the painter Vanessa Bell followed as Kara’s third play in this series .

The next period of Kara’s life was a mix of very welcome grandparenthood duties and concentrating on her singing, branching out into cabaret for many charity concerts at the Wabe and professionally at The Pheasantry, the cabaret bar at Pizza Express in Chelsea.

The pandemic saw Kara return to writing and researching and she produced her fourth ‘painter play’, Art Angel on Angelica Kauffmann. In 2024 the fifth painter play, Beryl Cook: A Private View was the result of a happy collaboration with Beryl Cook’s son John.