Ruby Wax OBE | Keynote Speaker

Ruby Wax has become one of the best-known and most popular faces on television in recent years, with her brash style being described as refreshing, charming, endearing and very funny.

She began her acting career at The Crucible in Sheffield, arriving fresh from the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. She soon moved on to the Royal Shakespeare Company, where she played featured roles in many plays, including The Tempest, Wild Oats and Love’s Labour’s Lost.

Whilst at Stratford, Ruby started writing and performing her own shows, enlisting the help of other RSC performers including Zoe Wanamaker, Alan Rickman, Jonathan Pryce and David Suchet. “The Johnson Wax Floorshow”, which she devised with Darlene Johnson, transferred from Stratford to the Young Vic. The cast included an early appearance by Rik Mayall. This success was followed by “Desperately Yours”, which Ruby wrote and starred in alongside Juliet Stevenson and which she later took to New York, with director Alan Rickman, where it became an off-Broadway hit.

Upon leaving the RSC, Ruby found success as a scriptwriter for “Not The Nine O’Clock News”, a talent she exported to Los Angeles, where she wrote a sitcom pilot for CBS and sketches for Cheech & Chong and a Steve Martin TV special.

Returning to Britain, she linked up with French & Saunders to start work on the first series of “Girls On Top”. Ruby wrote and performed her one-woman show entitled “Wax Acts”, which was originally presented at the Edinburgh Festival, toured throughout the UK and completed a West End run at the Globe Theatre.

Ruby has also presented some very unusual documentaries, including “Miami Memoirs”, “East Meets Wax”, “Class Of ‘69” and “Ruby’s Health Quest”. She also wrote and starred in five series of her own show for BBC TV entitled “The Full Wax”.

“Ruby Wax Meets…”, written and presented by Ruby in her own unique and inimitable style, confronted Imelda Marcos, irritated Donald Trump and was intimate with Pamela Anderson. She is one of the few television personalities who has cracked Cannes and Hollywood. Her TV shows got under the skin of celebrity and looked at the wackier side of life.

After three decades working on stage, television and radio, Ruby Wax has recently changed direction.

She completed an MSc in Psychotherapy and a course in Neuroscience at UCL and now runs management workshops for business leaders, enabling them to find a deeper and more direct level of communication with their clients and colleagues.

Her keynote speeches and workshops combine humour with scientific and theoretical learning and practical exercises. In a very short space of time, leaders can come to a deeper and more direct level of communication with clients and colleagues. This kind of communication ensures that the individuals that make up an organisation work from a place of trust and transparency. Ruby demonstrates how leaders can get the best out of their teams, making them more effective, and participants leave with a set of tools, helping them create a climate of positivity and directly impacting their organisation.

Clients have included BAe, Orange, the Welsh Assembly, McKinsey, KPMG, Skype, Women in Retail, eBay, Deutsche Bank, London Business School, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Roffey Park, Microsoft and the Home Office.