Pam Ferris
Pam Ferris is an actor, born 1948.
Ferris was born in Hanover in 1948 and is Welsh, a combination that has never once been relevant to a role she has played. British television made her a household presence: Connie in 1985, then Ma Larkin in The Darling Buds of May from 1991, Peggy Snow in Where the Heart Is, which brought three National Television Award nominations for Most Popular Actress, Laura Thyme in Rosemary and Thyme, and Sister Evangelina in Call the Midwife.
What she does is play formidable women without apologising for them or winking at the audience. Miss Trunchbull in Matilda is the famous example and it works precisely because she declines to camp it up: the performance is played as a genuine authoritarian, physically committed and entirely serious, and that seriousness is what makes children remember it as terrifying rather than silly. Aunt Marge in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is a smaller version of the same instinct.
The dramatic work gets less attention and deserves more. Miriam in Children of Men is warmth in a film that has almost none, Grace Poole in Jane Eyre is a study in withholding, and Mrs Squeers in Nicholas Nickleby is Dickensian cruelty played from the inside. She has also been perfectly happy in broad comedy, from Death to Smoochy to the Nativity films to Gavin and Stacey, and turned up in Amandaland in 2025.
Movies (17)
- Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)
- Matilda (1996)
- Children of Men (2006)
- Piccadilly Jim (2004)
- Holmes & Watson (2018)
- Tolkien (2019)
- The Raven (2012)
- Death to Smoochy (2002)
- Meantime (1983)
- The Other Man (2008)
- Nativity 2: Danger in the Manger! (2012)
- Ethel & Ernest (2016)
- The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (2001)
- Nativity! (2009)
- Saving Santa (2013)
- Jackboots on Whitehall (2010)
- Pollyanna (2003)
TV (14)
Where to start with Pam Ferris
There is only one sensible place to begin, and it is Matilda. Trunchbull is one of the great screen villains for children, and the reason to watch it as an adult is how little she softens the part.
Then Children of Men, which is the counter-argument: the same actor supplying nearly all the human warmth in a bleak film, and doing it in a handful of scenes. Call the Midwife is the long-form television version, and Sister Evangelina is her best sustained character.
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is a single memorable sequence. The Darling Buds of May is where a generation of British viewers first knew her, sunny and enormous fun. Death to Smoochy is the strange one, and worth it if you like your comedy mean.