A woman of the stage

She was born Costina Ciuciulică in Constanța, the old Greek Tomis on the Black Sea, the town to which Ovid was exiled and where he wrote the Tristia. It is not a bad birthplace for someone who would spend her life saying other people’s words with her own body.

Her first diploma was a practical one: the “C-tin Brătescu” Pedagogical College, which qualified her to teach small children, followed by psycho-pedagogy and English at the “Ovidius” University. She was preparing, on paper, for a life of classrooms. She did teach, for several years. But she had known since childhood, she says, that she liked to show off — the odd child forever happy to recite poems and sing songs to the visitors — and the thought that one could study in order to say poems somewhere other than the family sitting room pointed her towards Bucharest. She only said it out loud once she had first satisfied her mother’s wish for a serious degree; from the moment she did, nothing else weighed — not the mockery of the neighbours, not her parents’ fear that the other candidates would have connections.

After two seasons at the Constanța State Theatre — including a Feydeau and the Presniakov brothers’ Terrorism under Felix Alexa — she was engaged by Ion Caramitru at the National Theatre “I.L. Caragiale” in Bucharest, where she has been a member of the company ever since.

Her debut there, in 2009, was Ann Deever in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, directed by Caramitru, opposite Victor Rebengiuc and Sanda Toma. The same year, in Târgoviște, she took on Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire — the two poles of her range, the wounded American realist and the woman who cannot stop performing her own life, established in a single season.

What followed reads like a deliberate refusal to repeat herself: Christine in Veber’s Le Dîner de cons beside Horațiu Mălăele and Medeea Marinescu; Helge in Dürrenmatt’s The Visit under Alexander Morfov, with Maia Morgenstern; Cocuța Micșoreanu in Minulescu’s Allegro, ma non troppo; Lily in Theresa Rebeck’s Loose Knit; Lady Capulet in Yuri Kordonsky’s Romeo and Juliet; Calipsița in Gigi Căciuleanu’s danced Kiritza; and Elvira in Dragoș Galgoțiu’s staging of Mateiu Caragiale’s Craii de Curtea-Veche, a role of feathers, ruin and phosphorescent decadence that has become one of her signatures.

Most recently she has been the Mother in two plays written and directed by Gavril Pătru — Ghosts and Dandelions (2025) and The Bride’s Time and Her Gown (2026) — a return to the plain, rural Romanian voice from which so much of the country’s theatre grows.

Her first television audiences knew her, under her birth name, as Laura Avramescu in the Acasă TV series Războiul sexelor (2007). On film she has worked with Horațiu Mălăele in Happy Funerals, with Mihai Sofronea and Raia al Souliman on short films, and twice with Ovidiu Georgescu — as Antoinette Russi in Dirijorul tăcerilor and, most recently, as the Fairy in a feature currently in production.