Picasso would have loved Olwen Fouéré. With features that that fall somewhere between beautiful and handsome — think Joan Allen crossed with Terrence Stamp — the Irish-French actor exhibits all the qualities of one of the great modernist’s Weeping Women: their statuesque physicality, the intensity of the relationship between their form and emotional content, and the fact you always seem to be looking at them from every available angle at once. This last point is especially true of Fouéré, who works between countries and soon hopes to begin toggling between stage and screen. With so many personal and professional sides, her approach to life is nothing if not Cubist.

“I certainly have a nomadic spirit and it is undeniably a part of my work,” Fouéré says from Glasgow, ahead of her appearance in Terminus at the Sydney Opera House. “Always new boundaries to cross, other territories to explore. For example, the main body of my work has been in Ireland, but I also feel an enormous kinship with European theatre. I think the collision of the two generates some kind of creative energy and produces something new.”

Fouéré’s resume is testament to this collision — she has performed extensively in Ireland, Britain and Europe — as well as to the “something new” it has allowed her to create. Between 1980 and 2008, Fouéré was co-artistic director of Operating Theatre, Ireland’s leading avant-garde performance company. The company’s focus was, she says, to help us “envision something beyond what we think we are”.

“I think that is one of the reasons theatre exists, making the invisible visible and the impossible possible,” she says. “Naturalism works perfectly well in many plays and very well on television. But I’ve never seen the value of art merely reflecting society. For me, it is an act of resistance against a prescribed reality.”

Fouéré says Mark O’Rowe’s Terminus, which is returning to Australia after appearing in the Melbourne International Arts Festival in 2009, resists reality in its own unique way.  “It does have potent supernatural encounters which, I think, give the play a spiritual dimension,” she says. “But my passion for this project really arose from my love of Mark’s writing and the poetry he can extract from often very violent images.”

Having recently received her US Green Card, Fouéré is now looking forward to making a new type of image: a cinematic one. “Perhaps it’s the desire to leave a trace but some instinct has been pulling me in that direction,” she says. “It feels like a turning point.” (She recently appeared alongside Sean Penn in This Must Be the Place, which screened at the Cannes Film Festival in May.) Not that she is losing interest in the theatre or its future, of course. Asked where she thinks it should be headed next, her answer is wholly characteristic. “Into the wild,” she says. “I hope.”