My Top Five Favourite British Actresses (No Order)
List activity
3 views
• 0 this weekCreate a new list
List your movie, TV & celebrity picks.
5 people
- Actress
- Writer
- Producer
Emma Thompson was born on April 15, 1959 in Paddington, London, into a family of actors - father Eric Thompson and mother Phyllida Law, who has co-starred with Thompson in several films. Her sister, Sophie Thompson, is an actor as well. Her father was English-born and her mother is Scottish-born. Thompson's wit was cultivated by a cheerful, clever, creative family atmosphere, and she was a popular and successful student. She attended Cambridge University, studying English Literature, and was part of the university's Footlights Group, the famous group where, previously, many of the Monty Python members had first met.
Thompson graduated in 1980 and embarked on her career in entertainment, beginning with stints on BBC radio and touring with comedy shows. She soon got her first major break in television, on the comedy skit program Alfresco (1983), writing and performing along with her fellow Footlights Group alums Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. She also worked on other TV comedy review programs in the mid-1980s, occasionally with some of her fellow Footlights alums, and often with actor Robbie Coltrane.
Thompson found herself collaborating again with Fry in 1985, this time in his stage adaptation of the play "Me and My Girl" in London's West End, in which she had a leading role, playing Sally Smith. The show was a success and she received favorable reviews, and the strength of her performance led to her casting as the lead in the BBC television miniseries Fortunes of War (1987), in which Thompson and her co-star, Kenneth Branagh, play an English ex-patriate couple living in Eastern Europe as the Second World War erupts. Thompson won a BAFTA Award for her work on the program. She married Branagh in 1989, continued to work with him professionally, and formed a production company with him. In the late 80s and early 90s, she starred in a string of well-received and successful television and film productions, most notably her lead role in the Merchant-Ivory production of Howards End (1992), which confirmed her ability to carry a movie on both sides of the Atlantic and appropriately showered her with trans-Atlantic honors - both an Oscar and a BAFTA award.
Since then, Thompson has continued to move effortlessly between the art film world and mainstream Hollywood, though even her Hollywood roles tend to be in more up-market productions. She continues to work on television as well, but is generally very selective about which roles she takes. She writes for the screen as well, such as the screenplay for Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility (1995), in which she also starred as Elinor Dashwood, and the teleplay adaptation of Margaret Edson's acclaimed play Wit (2001), in which she also starred.
Thompson is known for her sophisticated, skillful, though her critics say somewhat mannered, performances, and of course for her arch wit, which she is unafraid to point at herself - she is a fearless self-satirist. Thompson and Branagh divorced in 1994, and Thompson is now married to fellow actor Greg Wise, who had played Willoughby in Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility (1995). Thompson and Wise have one child, Gaia, born in 1999. She was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire at the 2018 Queen's Birthday Honours for her services to drama.- Actress
- Producer
- Director
Dame Helen Mirren was born in Queen Charlotte's Hospital in West London. Her mother, Kathleen Alexandrina Eva Matilda (Rogers), was from a working-class English family, and her father, Vasiliy Petrovich Mironov, was a Russian-born civil servant, from Kuryanovo, whose own father was a diplomat. Mirren attended St. Bernards High School for girls, where she would act in school productions. After high school, she began her acting career in theatre working in many productions including in the West End and Broadway.- Actress
- Producer
- Writer
The iconoclastic gifts of the highly striking and ferociously talented actress Tilda Swinton have been appreciated by art house crowds and international audiences alike. After her stunning Oscar-winning turn as a high-powered corporate attorney in the George Clooney starring and critically-lauded legal thriller Michael Clayton (2007), however, her androgynous looks and often bizarre appeal have been embraced by more mainstream crowds as well.
She was born Katherine Mathilda Swinton into a patrician Scottish military family on November 5, 1960, in London, England. Her mother, Judith Balfour, Lady Swinton (née Killen), was Australian, and her father, Major-General Sir John Swinton, an army officer, was English-born. Her ancestry is Scottish, Northern Irish, and English, including a long tapestry of prominent Scottish ancestors. Educated at an English and a Scottish boarding school, Tilda subsequently studied Social and Political Science at Cambridge University and graduated in 1983 with a degree in English Literature.
During her tenure as a student, she performed countless stage productions and proceeded to work for a season with the Royal Shakespeare Company where she appeared in such productions as "Measure for Measure." The rebel insider her, however, was strong and she left the company after a year as her approach and interests began to shift dramatically. With a pungent taste for the unique and seldom tried, Tilda found some gender-bending stage roles come her way. She portrayed Mozart in Pushkin's "Mozart and Salieri", and as a working class woman impersonating her dead husband during World War II, in Manfred Karge's "Man to Man," a role she later committed to film (Man to Man (1992)).
In 1985, the tall, slender performer with alabaster skin and carrot-topped hair began a professional association with gay experimental director Derek Jarman. She continued to live and work with the groundbreaking writer/director/cinematographer for the next nine years, involving herself in seven of his often notorious films. This quirky, highly fascinating alliance would produce such stark and radical turns as the Berlin International Film Festival winners Caravaggio (1986), The Last of England (1987), The Garden (1990) and Edward II (1991) (playing Isabella, in which she won "Best Actress" at the Venice Film Festival) and Wittgenstein (1993), as well as the films Soursweet (1988) (a movie with no spoken dialogue) and the Stockholm Film Festival Award winner Blue (1993).
Jarman succumbed to complications from AIDS in 1994. His untimely demise left a devastating void in Tilda's life for quite some time. Her most notable performance of her Jarman period, however, came from a non-Jarman film. For the vivid title role in Orlando (1992), her nobleman character lives for 400 years while changing sex from man to woman. The film, which Swinton spent years helping writer/director Sally Potter develop and finance, continues to this day to have a worldwide devoted fan following.
Over the years, Tilda has preferred art to celebrity, opening herself to experimental projects with new and untried directors and mediums, delving into the worlds of installation art and cutting-edge fashion. Consistently off-centered roles in Female Perversions (1996), Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon (1998), Teknolust (2002), Young Adam (2003), Broken Flowers (2005) and Béla Tarr's The Man from London (2007) have added to her mystique. Back in 1995, she delved into a performance art piece in the Serpentine Gallery, London, where she was put on display to the public for a week, asleep (or apparently so), in a glass case.
Following the birth of her twins in 1997, Tilda would leave lean for a time towards Hollywood mainstream filming. The thriller The Deep End (2001), earned her a number of critic's awards and her first Golden Globe nomination. Other visible U.S. pictures included The Beach (2000) with Leonardo DiCaprio, fantasy epic Constantine (2005) with Keanu Reeves, her Oscar-decorated performance in Michael Clayton (2007) and, of course, her iconic White Witch in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005).
Into the millennium, Tilda continued to amaze starring in the crime drama Julia (2008) and in David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008). She learned Italian and Russian for Luca Guadagnino's I Am Love (2009), starred in the psychological thriller We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011), Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom (2012) and Bong Joon Ho's Snowpiercer (2013), and earned fine notice in Terry Gilliam's The Zero Theorem (2013). She also starred in the dark romantic fantasy drama Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) directed by Jim Jarmusch, had a small role in Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), starred in Judd Apatow's comedy Trainwreck (2015), and played a rock star in Luca Guadagnino's A Bigger Splash (2015).
Showing no signs of slowing up, Tilda continues to make creative, visual impressions in such films as the Coen Brothers' Hail, Caesar! (2016) where she reunited with Clooney and had a dual role playing twin journalists, and as the wise Asian teacher of Dr. Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) in the Marvel Comics action film Doctor Strange (2016), while repeating the part of The Ancient One in Avengers: Endgame (2019). She gave another eccentric, unhinged performance in the action adventure message movie Okja (2017), played Betsy Trotwood in a contemporary telling of The Personal History of David Copperfield (2019) and teamed up again with writer/director Jim Jarmusch in the thoroughly offbeat fantasy horror comedy The Dead Don't Die (2019).- Actress
- Producer
- Writer
Olivia Colman was born on 30 January 1974 in Norwich, Norfolk, England, UK. She is an actress and producer, known for The Favourite (2018), Tyrannosaur (2011) and The Lost Daughter (2021). She has been married to Ed Sinclair since August 2001. They have three children.- Actress
- Writer
- Producer
Sally Cecilia Hawkins was born in 1976 in Lewisham hospital, London, England, to Jacqui and Colin Hawkins, authors and illustrators of children's books. She is of English and Irish descent. Hawkins was brought up in Greenwich, in southeast London. She attended James Allen's Girls' School in Dulwich. She graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1998. Hawkins' theatre appearances include Much Ado About Nothing (2000), A Midsummer Night's Dream (2000), Misconceptions (2001), Country Music (2004), and David Hare's adaptation of Federico García Lorca's play The House of Bernarda Alba in 2005. Hawkins made her first notable screen performance as Samantha in the 2002 Mike Leigh film All or Nothing (2002). She also appeared as Slasher in the 2004 film Layer Cake (2004). She played the role of Zena Blake in the BBC adaptation of Sarah Waters' novel, Tipping the Velvet (2002) in 2002. Her first major television role came in 2005, when she played Susan Trinder in the BAFTA-nominated BBC drama Fingersmith (2005), an adaptation of Sarah Waters' novel of the same name, in which she co-starred with Imelda Staunton, as she had in Vera Drake (2004). Since then she has gone on to star in another BBC adaptation, Patrick Hamilton's Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky. Hawkins appeared in three episodes of the BBC comedy series Little Britain (2003), in addition to Ed Reardon's Week on BBC Radio 4. She has also contributed to the BBC Radio 4 series Concrete Cow. In 2006, Hawkins returned to the stage, appearing at the Royal Court Theatre in Jez Butterworth's The Winterling. In 2007, she played the lead in a new film of Jane Austen's Persuasion, and followed this with her critically acclaimed performance in Happy-Go-Lucky (2008). Questions and a minor controversy arose when Hawkins was not nominated for an Academy Award for her performance as Poppy. It was the first year since 2000-01 that the winner of the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Motion Picture Musical or Comedy was not nominated for an Academy Award, and the first year since 1995-96 that no one from the category was nominated. During 2006 she also made uncredited appearances in Richard Ayoade's Man to Man with Dean Learner where she played various uncredited roles from Personal Assistant to Wife of Steve Pising in various deleted scenes included on the DVD. Hawkins' 2009-10 films included Desert Flower (2009), Never Let Me Go (2010), and Happy Ever Afters (2009). In November 2010, she appeared on Broadway as Vivie in Mrs. Warren's Profession. In 2011, Hawkins appeared in Submarine (2010) and had a supporting role in the film adaptation of Jane Eyre (2011).
In 2017, Sally was highly critically acclaimed for her role as Elisa, a mute janitor, in director Guillermo del Toro fantasy drama The Shape of Water (2017).