Imelda Staunton, the actress with five Oliviers the world still calls Umbridge

Imelda Staunton

Photo: Imelda_Staunton.jpg: Manon PRESNE derivative work: Old Moonraker (talk) / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	January 9, 1956 Archway, London, England
Occupation	Actress and singer
Known for	Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Maleficent
Awards	BAFTA · Volpi Cup · European Film · 2 Laurence Olivier · SAG Award (shared) · Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire

Most of the world met Imelda Staunton as a woman in a pink cardigan who clears her throat before she hurts you. Dolores Umbridge, the Hogwarts inquisitor with the kitten plates and the punishment quill, gave her a face recognised far beyond the cinema, and The Crown later handed her the most guarded face in British public life to wear. Both jobs asked her to hold everything in. In London’s theatres she has spent half a century doing the opposite, singing Sondheim and Jerry Herman to the back of the gallery and collecting five Olivier Awards along the way. The screen hires her for restraint. The stage is where she lets go, and the distance between those two careers says more about her than either one.

The ear came from downstairs. Staunton grew up above a hairdressing salon in Archway, north London, the only child of Irish parents from County Mayo: Joseph, a labourer, and Bridie, who cut hair in the shop and played accordion and fiddle in Irish showbands without being able to read a note of music. At La Sainte Union, a Catholic girls’ school, an elocution teacher steered her into school plays, among them a turn as Polly Peachum in The Beggar’s Opera. The Central School of Speech and Drama and the Guildhall both turned her down. The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art took her at eighteen.

Staunton, born on 9 January 1956, left the academy in 1976 for six years of repertory, including a spell at the Northcott Theatre in Exeter, where she played Shaw’s Saint Joan in 1979. At the National Theatre in 1982 she returned to The Beggar’s Opera, this time as Lucy Lockit, the other woman in Macheath’s triangle, and in that season’s Guys and Dolls she met the actor Jim Carter, whom she married. Her first Olivier came in 1985, a supporting award shared between A Chorus of Disapproval at the National and The Corn Is Green at the Old Vic. Her second arrived for the Baker’s Wife in the original London production of Sondheim’s Into the Woods.

Cinema treated her, for most of the 1990s, as a reliable face at the edge of the frame. Kenneth Branagh cast her in Peter’s Friends and Much Ado About Nothing; Ang Lee gave her Charlotte Palmer in Sense and Sensibility; she was part of the ensemble of Shakespeare in Love that shared a Screen Actors Guild award.

Then Mike Leigh built Vera Drake around her. Staunton played a cheerful London charwoman in 1950 who, unknown to her family, helps young women end pregnancies, and the performance refused to plead: Vera does not think she is doing anything remarkable, and the law decides otherwise. It won the Golden Lion at Venice, and Staunton took the Volpi Cup, the European Film Award and the BAFTA for Best Actress, plus an Oscar nomination.

What followed was not the run of leading roles that kind of notice usually buys. There was Nanny McPhee, Freedom Writers and the BBC’s Cranford, in which Carter and their daughter Bessie also appeared. Then came Umbridge in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix in 2007, bureaucratic sadism delivered in a girlish whisper, reprised in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1. In 2012 she played Alma Reville, Alfred Hitchcock‘s wife and collaborator, in the HBO film The Girl, earning BAFTA Television and Emmy nominations.

The stage, meanwhile, gave her the roles that cinema would not. At Chichester she played Mrs Lovett in Sweeney Todd opposite Michael Ball, and then Mama Rose in Gypsy, a part built for a star who devours the room; both productions moved to the West End and both brought her Oliviers, in 2013 and 2016. In 2017 she was Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Sally in the National Theatre’s Follies. On screen she voiced Aunt Lucy in Paddington and its sequels, played the Welsh campaigner Hefina Headon in Pride, and Queen Mary’s lady-in-waiting in Downton Abbey, a film in which her husband plays the butler, Carson.

That imbalance is the uncomfortable part of her story. After Vera Drake, British and American film had a leading actress of rare precision and mostly used her as an aunt, a villain, a fairy or a voice. The Crown finally gave her a lead on screen, Elizabeth II in the fifth and sixth seasons, and the reception was divided. TIME’s critic called her Queen “impassive to the point of opacity” and wrote that the performance “lacks interiority”, though the review laid much of the remoteness at the door of Peter Morgan’s scripts. The awards bodies disagreed: she was nominated for a Golden Globe for both seasons, for a BAFTA and for an Emmy. On 8 September 2022 she was filming as the Queen when news came that Elizabeth II had died; she and Lesley Manville finished the day’s work before filming stopped.

The theatre, again, answered first. In summer 2024 she played Dolly Levi in Hello, Dolly! at the London Palladium, and in April 2025 that performance brought her a fifth Olivier, her fourth as best actress in a musical, which she dedicated to her late mother. The King’s Birthday Honours had made her a Dame the summer before. In 2025 she was back in the West End with Dominic Cooke’s revival of Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession at the Garrick, playing opposite Bessie Carter as her estranged daughter, the first time the two had shared a stage; National Theatre Live took the production into cinemas that October.

In Pablo Trapero’s & Sons, written by Sarah Polley from David Gilbert’s novel, she plays Isabel Platt opposite Bill Nighy; the film premiered at Toronto in September 2025 and reached British cinemas on 21 August 2026. On 15 September 2026 BritBox launched Tommy & Tuppence, a present-day, six-episode take on Agatha Christie’s sleuths, with Antonia Thomas and Josh Dylan in the title roles and Staunton as Aunt Ada, a dry retired private investigator who once ran Blunt’s Brilliant Detectives. That same month RADA made her an Honorary Fellow, half a century after she walked out of its doors.

Staunton and Carter live in West Hampstead. Next comes Netflix’s six-part series of Roald Dahl’s stories for adults, adapted by Danny Brocklehurst, in which she joins Nicola Coughlan, Toby Jones and Dominic West; no release date has been set. Dahl’s adult fiction runs on politeness curdling into cruelty, a register she has owned since the cardigan. The open question is whether the screen will ever ask her for what London audiences already know she can give.

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Tags: actors, actresses, The Crown, Mike Leigh, Imelda Staunton, Vera Drake

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