Eve Best
Eve Best is an actor, born 1971.
The screen record here is mostly television, and mostly people with authority they are careful about using. Best is billed as an actress and director, though what our catalogue holds is the acting, and it is remarkably consistent in register: doctors, diplomats, princesses, wives of men with expeditions to run.
Her longest job was Dr Eleanor O'Hara on Nurse Jackie from 2009 to 2015, a part that let her be the least anxious person in a permanently chaotic hospital. She played Monica Chatwin in the BBC miniseries The Honourable Woman in 2014, First Lady Dolley Madison in an American Experience special in 2011, and Petra Mayler in The Shadow Line. On film she was Wallis Simpson in The King's Speech, and Sally Ride in The Challenger Disaster.
The role that widened her audience came late: Princess Rhaenys Targaryen in House of the Dragon from 2022 to 2024, in a show where almost everyone is shouting about succession and she is the one doing arithmetic. It is a good use of what she has always been good at.
The rest is a mixed bag. Farah Dowling in Fate: The Winx Saga and Anna Clayton in Stan Lee's Lucky Man are genre paycheques played straight. Eleanor Shackleton in the 2002 Shackleton and a narration job on the documentary Unity round out a filmography that is noticeably smaller than her reputation.
Movies (3)
TV (8)
Where to start with Eve Best
Two performances carry the argument. Nurse Jackie is the long one and the best showcase: years of playing the calmest person in a hospital full of people coming apart, which sounds easy and is not. House of the Dragon is the other, and it is the more efficient introduction, because the show hands her whole scenes built on a look rather than a speech.
From there, The Honourable Woman is the serious one, a slow espionage piece where she gets to be genuinely hard to read. The King's Speech casts her as Wallis Simpson in support, and she plays the coldness without editorialising about it. The Shadow Line is the cult pick, stylised to the point of being airless, and worth it.
Fate: The Winx Saga and Shackleton are for completists only, the first because the material is beneath her and the second because it is a period television drama doing period television things.
Withheld anger, at length
Her specialism on television: women who were overlooked or overruled and refuse to say so out loud. Rhaenys in House of the Dragon is the fullest version, and The Honourable Woman and The Shadow Line are the same control in bleaker material.
Comedy, film and the real people
The other side of the range: six seasons of Nurse Jackie where she is very funny indeed, plus the historical figures. She plays Wallis Simpson, Sally Ride and Emily Shackleton, which is an unusual set to have on one resume.