Anna Chancellor
Anna Theodora Chancellor (born 27 April 1965) is an English actress who has received nominations for BAFTA and Olivier Awards. Background and early life. Chancellor was born in Richmond, England to barrister John Paget Chancellor, eldest son of Sir Christopher Chancellor, and Mary Jolliffe, a daughter of Lord Hylton. The Chancellor family were Scottish gentry who owned land at Quothquan since 1432. Chancellor was brought up in Somerset and educated at St Mary's School, Shaftesbury, which was a Roman Catholic boarding school for girls in Dorset, but left at sixteen to live in London, later describing her  early years there as "quite wild". In her early twenties, she became the partner of the poet Jock Scot (1952–2016), with whom she had her daughter, Poppy Chancellor (born 1988), while still studying at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. She separated from Scot a few years later. She got her first acting role on television playing Mercedes Page in "Jupiter Moon", a BSkyB soap, then came a commercial for Boddingtons beer and a part in the film "Four Weddings and a Funeral" (1994), playing Henrietta (nicknamed "Duckface") opposite Hugh Grant. Chancellor is a niece of the journalist  Alexander Chancellor, a great-granddaughter of Raymond Asquith (son of the liberal prime minister H. H. Asquith), a first cousin of both the actress Dolly Wells and the model Cecilia Chancellor, and a second cousin of the actress Helena Bonham Carter. Chancellor herself has spoken of her lineage, stating: Career. Chancellor played Julia Piper in series 1 to 3 of "Kavanagh QC". She also played Caroline Bingley in the 1995 BBC adaptation of "Pride and Prejudice", and Questular Rontok in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" (2005). The same year, she joined the cast of BBC One television drama  series "Spooks" as Juliet Shaw. She has also appeared in "The Vice", "Karaoke", "Cold Lazarus", "The Dreamers", "Tipping the Velvet" and "Fortysomething", and had a leading role in the satirical black comedy "Suburban Shootout". In 2011, she took a supporting role in the BBC thriller serial "The Hour", for which she was nominated for the British Academy Television Award for Best Supporting Actress. In 1997, she was nominated for the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for her performance in "Stanley", and in 2013 she was nominated for the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actress for  her part in "Private Lives". Charity. She is a patron of the London children's charity Scene & Heard. Audiobooks. Chancellor has played the role of Ann Smiley in BBC dramatisations of the John le Carré novels "Call for the Dead", "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy", "The Honourable Schoolboy" and "Smiley's People".