Susanna Thompson
Susanna Thompson is an actor, born 1958.
Playing a queen is a habit here. Thompson has been the Borg Queen in three episodes of Star Trek: Voyager, Queen Rose Benjamin in Kings, and Moira Queen on Arrow, which is a coincidence of names but not of type. She also played Dr. Lenara Kahn in the Deep Space Nine episode Rejoined, which is not among the credits listed here.
The reason she keeps getting these parts is that she does authority with a private fracture in it. Nothing she plays is only powerful. Karen Sammler in Once and Again, from 1999 to 2002, is the naturalistic version, a divorced mother written with more interior life than network drama usually allows, and it remains her best sustained work. Moira Queen is the operatic version, a woman managing a family and a set of secrets at the same time, and Thompson plays the strain rather than the villainy, which is what keeps the character interesting through the early seasons of Arrow.
The film credits are supporting and steady: Little Giants, When a Man Loves a Woman, Ghosts of Mississippi, Random Hearts, Dragonfly, The Ballad of Jack and Rose, The Public, and more recently Jeanne in the horror picture Malignant. Television has always been the home ground, with Hollis Mann on NCIS, Diane Yates on Cold Case and Carol Preston on Timeless filling in around the bigger roles.
Movies (9)
TV (9)
Where to start with Susanna Thompson
Arrow is the popular door and Once and Again is the better one. That series is a quietly excellent family drama that has been badly forgotten, and Karen Sammler is the part that shows what Thompson can do with time and a good writer.
If you came from the superhero side, Arrow is worth starting from the beginning rather than skipping to her big scenes, because Moira only works as a slow accumulation. Star Trek: Voyager is the fan credit, and her Borg Queen is a genuinely eerie piece of casting, playing the collective as one seductive voice. Kings is the beautiful failure on her list, a modern retelling of the David story that ran a single season. For films, Ghosts of Mississippi is the serious one and Malignant is the recent swing, best watched with no preparation at all.