Bianca Amato is a South African actress known for her work in American theatre, as a prolific audiobook performer and for her portrayal of Philippa De Villiers in the original cast of the South African soap opera Isidingo.
Amato was a member of the original cast of the long running South African soap opera Isidingo, portraying Philippa De Villiers from 1998 to 2001. The character's relationship with mine manager Derek Nyathi (Hlomla Dandala) featured the first interracial kiss, and was the first interracial romance, to be depicted on South African television. The storyline has been described as "groundbreaking and big news in post apartheid South African television". Of the experience Amato said, "It was wonderful to be part of the slow but healthy process that shifted people's attitudes." Her performance in Isidingo earned Amato an Avante for Best Actress in a Television Series.
In 2002, Amato was granted a United States Permanent Resident Card as an "Alien of Extraordinary Ability" in the arts and emigrated to the United States. After appearing in a 2002 episode of the HBO series Sex and the City, she 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. In 2015, Amato portrayed Delia Alexander in the 2015 PlayStation Network series Powers.
Amato appeared in the original Broadway production of Tom Stoppard's Tony Award-winning trio of plays The Coast of Utopia (2006–07), as well as the 2013–14 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. Amato also starred as Amanda in a production of Noël Coward's Private Lives directed by Maria Aitken, first presented in 2012 at the Huntington Theatre Company in Boston, and again in 2014 at the Shakespeare Theatre Company's Lansburgh Theatre in Washington, D. C. In 2014 she also portrayed Regan in the Theatre for a New Audience production of King Lear in New York.
Amato has narrated over 40 audiobooks, including most of the historical novels in the Cousins' War series written by Philippa Gregory, and Charles Stross' 2008 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.
