Lydia Leonard

Lydia Leonard is a British actress born on 5 December 1981 in Paris, France. She received her secondary education at Bedales School in Steep, Hampshire, and subsequently trained at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School in Bristol, England.

Leonard's stage career began in earnest in 2005, when she appeared as Polyxena in the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Hecuba, starring Vanessa Redgrave, which played in London's West End before transferring to BAM in New York. That same year, she took on the role of Caroline Cushing in the original Donmar Theatre and West End productions of Frost/Nixon. In May 2009, she appeared alongside Francesca Annis in the National Theatre's production of Time and the Conways, playing Hazel Conway. Leonard then portrayed Jackie Onassis in Martin Sherman's Onassis at the Novello Theatre in London in 2010.

Her most prominent stage work came through the RSC's adaptation of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, in which Leonard played Anne Boleyn. The productions ran at London's Aldwych Theatre from May through October 2014 before transferring to Broadway's Winter Garden Theatre as Wolf Hall: Parts One and Two, where they ran from March through July 2015. Her performance earned her both a Tony Award nomination for Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Role in a Play and a Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding Featured Actress in a Play, both in 2015. In March 2023, Leonard starred in Women, Beware the Devil at the Almeida Theatre in London.

Leonard's screen work spans film and television across multiple decades. In 2008, she played the female lead in the BBC's feature film remake of The 39 Steps and appeared in the 2010 feature film Archipelago, directed by Joanna Hogg, in which she played the character Cynthia. In 2012, she appeared in two episodes of the ITV drama series Whitechapel as psychiatrist Morgan Lamb, a role for which she received a nomination for Most Outstanding Actress at the Monte Carlo television awards. The following year, she appeared in the action adventure film Legendary: Tomb of the Dragon and played Alex Lang in DreamWorks' The Fifth Estate, starring Benedict Cumberbatch. In 2015, Leonard portrayed Virginia Woolf in Life in Squares, a BBC miniseries about the Bloomsbury Group.

Her television credits also include an ongoing role in the 1950s-set detective series Jericho, starring Robert Lindsay, as well as appearances in True True Lie (2006), The Long Walk to Finchley (2008), a cameo in Rome (2006), and a role as a nurse in Casualty 1909. Between 2019 and 2022, she played Mariana Lawton in the BBC series Gentleman Jack. In 2022, Leonard starred as Rebecca Fox in Ten Percent, the English-language adaptation of the French series Call My Agent!, and appeared as Cherie Blair in series five of Netflix's The Crown, a role she continued through 2023. In 2024, she was cast as Lady Rochford in the BBC television adaptation of Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light, taking over the role from Jessica Raine, who had portrayed the character in the first season.