Victoria Hamilton

Victoria Hamilton, born Victoria Sharp on 5 April 1971 in Wimbledon, London, is an English actress whose career spans classical theatre, television, and film. Raised in a non-theatrical family, she attended St Hilary's School in Surrey from 1974 to 1982 and then Prior's Field School in Godalming until 1987. Though she initially planned to read English at Bristol University, she instead trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, from which she graduated before embarking on a professional acting career.

Hamilton spent the first five years of her career working in classical theatre, including an eighteen-month stint with the Royal Shakespeare Company and work with the National Theatre. In 1995, she appeared in Peter Hall's production of Ibsen's The Master Builder at the Haymarket Theatre in London's West End, starring alongside Alan Bates and Gemma Jones. That production earned her the London Critics Circle Theatre Award for Most Promising Newcomer. She had also previously performed at the Orange Tree Theatre in London, including in an adaptation of a play by James Saunders. In 2000, she received the Critics' Circle Theatre Award for her performance in As You Like It at the Crucible Theatre.

Her Broadway debut came in 2003 with A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, for which she received both a Theatre World Award and a Tony Award nomination for Best Actress in a Play. The production, in which she co-starred with Eddie Izzard, portrays the parents of a child with severe brain damage who attempt to preserve their marriage through humor and dark comedy. Hamilton had previously performed in the London production of the same play in 2002, appearing first alongside Clive Owen and later Izzard. The following year, she appeared in a production of Tennessee Williams' Suddenly, Last Summer at the Lyceum Theatre in Sheffield, a performance that earned her both the Critics' Circle Theatre Award and the Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Actress. After a three-year break from the stage, she returned in 2008 to play Viola in Twelfth Night at Wyndham's Theatre in the West End.

Throughout the 1990s, Hamilton built a parallel television career through a series of Jane Austen adaptations. She appeared as Mrs. Forster in the 1995 BBC serial Pride and Prejudice, as Henrietta Musgrove in the 1995 film Persuasion, and as Maria Bertram in the 1999 film Mansfield Park. In 2001, she was cast as Queen Victoria in the BBC miniseries Victoria & Albert, a role she secured after auditioning with director John Erman in a London hotel suite and being offered the part immediately. In 2005, she appeared in the three-part miniseries To the Ends of the Earth alongside Benedict Cumberbatch and Jared Harris, an adaptation of William Golding's novels set during the Napoleonic Wars. From 2008 to 2011, she played Ruby Pratt, one of two spinster sisters running a fashion shop, in the BBC1 series Lark Rise to Candleford. In 2013, she played Peggy in the BBC drama What Remains.

Hamilton appeared in both series of the BBC1 drama Doctor Foster, playing Anna Baker in 2015 and reprising the role in 2017. From 2016 to 2017, she portrayed Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother in the first two seasons of the Netflix series The Crown. Since 2020, she has starred in the Sky drama Cobra as Anna Marshall, the Downing Street Chief of Staff, a role she has continued through 2023.

In her personal life, Hamilton met actor Mark Bazeley while the two were co-starring in the 2005 production of Suddenly, Last Summer. They became engaged on a beach in Greece and married in 2008. They have two sons together.