Frances Barber

Barber does one thing extremely well: she plays women who decided, some time before the scene started, that they are not going to be embarrassed. It works for comedy and for menace, and she has spent forty years being cast for both.

Theatre is the spine of the career. She was nominated for Olivier Awards for Camille in 1985 and Uncle Vanya in 1997, and the stage rhythm is audible in her screen work, which tends to be sharper and more projected than television usually asks for. She was still at it in 2024, playing the First Player and the Player Queen in Hamlet.

Her film career includes three separate collaborations with Gary Oldman, beginning with Prick Up Your Ears in 1987, where she played Joe Orton's sister Leonie; Sammy and Rosie Get Laid arrived the same year. Later came Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool and The Bookshop, both in 2017, and a peculiar detour into football melodrama across Goal! and Goal II: Living the Dream.

Television is where the volume is. She has been an eyepatched antagonist in Doctor Who, Caroline Warwick QC in Silk, Lady Millicent in Poirot, Sheila Bloom in Friday Night Dinner, Mrs Brandley in Great Expectations, Janine in Gimme Gimme Gimme, Catherine the Great in a Playhouse Presents half-hour, and Dolly Nolan in Whitstable Pearl, which gives her the best of both registers: comic timing with something considerably harder underneath it.