Amanda Drew

Amanda Drew is a British actress born on 21 December 1969 in Boston, England. One of four children, she grew up in a family headed by a nurse mother and a vicar father. Her education took her across England: she attended Beauchamp College in Oadby, Leicestershire, where she joined a youth theatre and played Charity in Sweet Charity, and later King's School in Ottery St. Mary, Devon, after her family relocated. She trained at RADA, graduating in 1992.

Following her graduation, Drew built a substantial stage career at the Royal Court Theatre and in various other West End productions, working across both dramatic and comedic roles. In 2001 she joined the Royal Shakespeare Company. Her stage work continued to earn recognition, and in 2003 she received the Outstanding Newcomer award at the London Evening Standard Theatre Awards for her performance in Eastward Ho! at the Gielgud Theatre. In March 2009 she appeared in the UK premiere of Parlour Song at the Almeida Theatre. That same year, in July, she took on the role of Claudia Roe in ENRON at the Minerva Theatre in Chichester, a character conceived as a fictional composite of female executives from the failed Enron Corporation. The production transferred to the Royal Court Theatre in October 2009 and subsequently to the West End in January 2010.

Drew made her Broadway debut in 2019, appearing in Florian Zeller's play The Height of the Storm. The production marked her entry into the New York theatre landscape after decades of work on British stages.

On British television, Drew is perhaps best known for playing Dr. May Wright in the BBC One soap opera EastEnders, a role she originated in September 2006 and held until June 2007, with a return in June 2008. The character became central to one of the year's largest storylines, a love triangle involving May, her husband Rob Minter, played by Stuart Laing, and Dawn Swann, played by Kara Tointon. The complexity of the character earned May the nicknames "Mad May" and "Psycho Doctor" in the press. In May 2007, a planned storyline in which May would abduct Dawn and Rob's newborn baby was substantially rewritten following the disappearance of toddler Madeleine McCann; the BBC stated that any storyline involving child abduction would be inappropriate given the circumstances. As the revised story concluded, May held Dawn hostage and was arrested, leading to Drew's departure from the series. Her return in June 2008 saw May operating under the assumed name Jenny before the character was killed off on 18 June 2008 in a gas explosion at the Miller house.

Beyond EastEnders, Drew's television credits span a wide range of productions, including Broadchurch, Chernobyl, The Last Post, A Very British Scandal, The Girl Before, Wednesday, and the Black Mirror episode "Smithereens." In 2025 she starred in The Bombing of Pan Am 103, also known as Lockerbie, portraying a victim's mother. The disaster depicted in the production occurred on 21 December 1988, which was Drew's nineteenth birthday.