Lindsay Duncan

Lindsay Duncan is a Scottish actress born on 7 November 1950. One of her parents was from Edinburgh and the other from Glasgow, and the family relocated to Leeds and then Birmingham during her childhood. She attended King Edward VI High School for Girls in Birmingham on a scholarship. Her father, who had spent 21 years in the British army before becoming a civil servant, died in a car accident when Duncan was 15. Her mother, who later developed Alzheimer's disease and died in 1994, inspired playwright Sharman Macdonald to write The Winter Guest (1995), directed by Alan Rickman.

Duncan's introduction to theatre came through school productions, and she later enrolled at London's Central School of Speech and Drama at the age of 21. After completing her training, she worked in summer weekly repertory in Southwold to obtain her Equity card. Her early stage work included two small parts in Molière's Don Juan at the Hampstead Theatre in 1976, followed by a period at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester, where she appeared in eight productions over two years from its opening. In 1978 she returned to London to perform in David Hare's Plenty at the National Theatre. Her breakthrough came with Caryl Churchill's Top Girls at the Royal Court, in which she played Lady Nijo, a 13th-century Japanese concubine; the production later transferred to the Public Theater in New York, and her performance earned her an Obie Award. Early television work included appearances in On Approval (1982), Reilly, Ace of Spies (1983), and Dead Head (1985), as well as her first significant film role in Richard Eyre's Loose Connections alongside Stephen Rea.

In 1985 Duncan joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, playing Helen of Troy in Troilus and Cressida. That same year she originated the role of the Marquise de Merteuil in Christopher Hampton's Les Liaisons Dangereuses, adapted from the French novel by Choderlos de Laclos. The production opened at The Other Place in Stratford-upon-Avon in September 1985, transferred to The Pit at the Barbican Centre in January 1986, and subsequently moved to the Ambassadors Theatre in the West End. In April 1987 the production came to Broadway, earning Duncan a Theatre World Award and a Tony Award nomination, as well as the Olivier Award for Best Actress. Her co-star Alan Rickman was replaced by John Malkovich, and Duncan herself was replaced by Glenn Close, when the play was adapted into Stephen Frears's film Dangerous Liaisons.

In 1988 Duncan received an Evening Standard Award for her portrayal of Maggie in Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. During the mid-1990s she became a regular presence in the work of Harold Pinter and in television productions by Alan Bleasdale and Stephen Poliakoff. For a second RSC season in 1994–95, she took on the double role of Hippolyta and Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream, a production that subsequently toured the United States. Her performance in David Mamet's The Cryptogram in 1994 led Al Pacino to cast her as his wife in Harold Becker's film City Hall (1996).

Duncan's Broadway career spanned 1987 to 2014 and included appearances in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, A Midsummer Night's Dream, A Delicate Balance, and Private Lives. Her reunion with Alan Rickman in a revival of Noël Coward's Private Lives in 2001–02 proved particularly distinguished: her performance as Amanda Prynne brought her a Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play and a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actress in a Play in 2002, as well as a second Olivier Award.

Her film work includes Prick Up Your Ears (1987), The Reflecting Skin (1990), City Hall (1996), An Ideal Husband, Mansfield Park, and Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (all 1999) — in the last of which she voiced the android TC-14 — Under the Tuscan Sun and AfterLife (both 2003), Starter for 10 (2006), Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland (2010), About Time (2013), Birdman (2014), and Blackbird (2019).

On television, Duncan played Barbara Douglas in Alan Bleasdale's G.B.H. (1991) and portrayed Servilia of the Junii in the HBO-BBC historical drama Rome from 2005 to 2007. She played Adelaide Brooke in the Doctor Who special "The Waters of Mars" in 2009, and that same year portrayed Margaret Thatcher in the television film Margaret. She had earlier played Elizabeth Longford in Longford (2006). Further television credits include Anjelica Hayden-Hoyle in the BBC Two miniseries The Honourable Woman (2014) and Lady Smallwood in BBC One's Sherlock from 2014 to 2017. Additional notable appearances include the role of Home Secretary Alex Cairns in "The National Anthem," the first episode of Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror, Queen Annis in the fourth series of BBC One's Merlin, and an upper-class passenger in Alan Bleasdale's The Sinking of the Laconia (2011). She also appeared in the original London run of Polly Stenham's That Face at the Royal Court and starred in a production of Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin in 2010, alongside Alan Rickman and Fiona Shaw, which transferred to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in early 2011.

Over the course of her career Duncan has received two Olivier Awards, a Tony Award, a Drama Desk Award, a Theatre World Award, and three BAFTA nominations, along with one Scottish BAFTA nomination.