Colm Feore, right, is Macbeth and Yanna McIntosh plays Lady Macbeth in the Stratford Shakespeare Festival's new production of Shakespeare's tragedy. (David Hou/Stratford Shakespeare Festival)

Yanna McIntosh is becoming the lady we love to hate. Last year at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, the dynamic actress played Helen of Troy, the trophy wife whose infidelity launched the 10-year Trojan War. This season, she stars as Lady Macbeth, the ambitious wife who urges her husband to kill the king of Scotland, unleashing a bloody reign of terror.

'She’s not just this crazed, psychotic, power-hungry woman pushing on her weak-willed husband. They are very much a partnership.'

—Yanna McIntosh on Lady Macbeth

However, if there’s anyone who can advocate for such infamous femmes, it’s McIntosh. The Dora and Gemini Award winner is known for her powers of persuasion. As Helen in The Trojan Women, she pleaded her case so convincingly we almost believed her sleek seducer was just the victim of a bum rap. Now she’s prepared to do the same for Lady M. Playing the spouse to Colm Feore’s titular tyrant in Macbeth — which officially opens the 2009 Stratford season on June 1 — McIntosh is out to shatter some preconceptions about her notorious character.

“She’s not just this crazed, psychotic, power-hungry woman pushing on her weak-willed husband,” McIntosh insists during an interview in the lounge of Stratford’s Festival Theatre. “They are very much a partnership.” She believes the Macbeths’ desire for power is mutual and fuelled by their love for one another. “Maybe it’s a love that’s gone wrong, or that leads down a wrong path, but that’s where I’m coming at it from.”

In this modern-dress production, directed by Stratford artistic boss Des McAnuff, the Macbeths are “people you can relate to,” McIntosh says, “a couple whose marriage is deteriorating.” She points out that while the two are very close in the early part of the play, after Macbeth has attained the throne, they drift apart. He descends into an all-consuming paranoia, while she wanders the castle in sleepwalking nightmares, trying to wash the dead king’s “blood” from her hands.

McIntosh and Feore in another scene from Macbeth. (David Hou/Stratford Shakespeare Festival)

“Whether or not you want to sympathize with her, at the very least you have to look at that scene and say, ‘There’s a human being,’ ” McIntosh says. “A person who can be tortured by guilt, by conscience, I don’t think you can call that person a monster.” And therein lies the payoff for McIntosh: “It’s much more interesting for me to play human beings than monsters.”

This year, she has ample opportunity to explore the humanity of Shakespeare’s creations. She’s playing not one but three leading characters in three of his greatest plays. Alongside Macbeth, she’s co-starring as Caesar’s wife, Calphurnia, in Julius Caesar, which opens June 6. Then, starting in August, she’ll also portray the fairy queen Titania in the comic fantasy A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Although this is her fifth season at Stratford, it’s the first in which she’s juggled a trio of major roles.

“It’s a dream season,” says a smiling McIntosh, looking coolly verdant in a green patterned jacket and jade earrings. “And it’s nicely laid-out, too. You start the season off with all this dark, heavy stuff — with Macbeth and Caesar — and then there’s the Dream, which is always just pure, lighthearted fun.”

This season also marks her move into Stratford's front ranks, starring opposite veterans like Feore and Geraint Wyn Davies. The last time McIntosh trod the boards with Feore, in 1994, he was headlining as Cyrano de Bergerac and she was just a lowly kid fresh from theatre school playing, as she puts it, “various fruit-sellers and nuns. So this is the first time that I feel like I’ve acted with him.”

She’s spending even more stage time with Wyn Davies. He’s paired with her both in Dream (as the rustic Bottom, Titania’s unlikely love object) and as the doomed Julius Caesar. In the latter play, McIntosh gets to do the flipside of Lady Macbeth — a wife who can’t get her hubby to listen to her. Calphurnia’s attempts to keep Caesar home on the predicted day of his assassination are famously futile.

“What am I gonna do?” McIntosh says, laughing. “I tease Ger that, in the end, I’ve just decided that Caesar’s too stupid to live. He takes all of these signs and warnings and ignores them, and off he goes and gets killed. What do you do with a husband like that?”

Yanna McIntosh as Helen in the 2008 Stratford production of The Trojan Women. (David Hou/Stratford Shakespeare Festival)

Since the 1990s, the Toronto-based McIntosh has been building stage cred as one of Canada’s finest actors. Equally adept at classic and contemporary theatre, her much-praised performances have run the spectrum from Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler and Schiller’s Mary Stuart, to her Dora-winning roles in David Hare’s Skylight and Athol Fugard’s Valley Song. Last year, she was memorable yet again as an enigmatic Condoleezza Rice in Hare’s Iraq war docudrama Stuff Happens.

She says her career “fell into place quite late, just by virtue of the fact that I didn’t really know anybody who did this.” Born in Kingston, Jamaica, but raised in Toronto, McIntosh says there were no performers in her family tree. “My grandmother sang in the church choir, but as far as I know, that’s it. There was nobody in my family to make me think [acting] was in any way viable or realistic.”

She studied drama at the University of Toronto but also took an education degree. After graduating in 1986, she taught for a year before her love of acting finally won out. She went on to hone her skills at the American Repertory Theater’s Harvard-based drama school and made her Stratford debut in 1993.

“I was so excited to first come here,” she remembers. “I thought, ‘Yes, it’s all happening, it’s all unfolding, I will forever be at the Stratford Festival!’ Then reality sets in and it’s hard to take at first. But then you realize what you are is an actress and you’re trained to do all kinds of different things.”

For her, those different things have included a healthy sideline in film and television, including recurring roles in past CBC series Riverdale and This Is Wonderland. More recently, she appeared in Deepa Mehta’s Heaven on Earth, as the Jamaican factory worker who befriends the film’s abused heroine. She's also a regular on the new TMN/Movie Central cop drama The Line.

McIntosh says she enjoys both screen and stage acting, but stage may have the edge. “I do love a live audience. I know it’s a cliché for people to say that, but there’s nothing like it.” She got a real kick out of trying to sway the audiences for The Trojan Women. When she made her entrance as Helen, late in the play, theatregoers had already heard a litany of woes from the female victims of the war she’d caused.

“Everything’s loaded against her,” McIntosh says. “They don’t want to hear from her, they don’t want to hear a damn thing that she’s got to say. And yet she must speak. I felt like, if I had a good night, if they didn’t completely come over to my side — which was a lot to ask — they’d waver. You could feel it. You don’t get that doing film or TV.”

She hopes to have a similar effect with Lady Macbeth. “I think it’s going to be hard to get people to sympathize with her; I don’t even know if that’s the point,” she says. “But what’s more important is that you’re able to recognize her as a human being with desires and faults, and maybe see some connection with yourself.”

Macbeth and Julius Caesar run to Oct. 31 and A Midsummer Night’s Dream runs Aug. 7-Oct. 30 at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.