Imelda Staunton, the hairdresser’s daughter who became queen

“Both my parents were Irish immigrants. Dad, Joe, was a labourer and my mum, Bridie, was a hairdresser. I grew up in Archway, north London, and we lived above the hairdresser’s. Mum was a real grafter, which I’ve inherited. She had me at 21 and shortly after was managing a large hairdressers, which she later owned. I wasn’t spoilt, but I didn’t want for anything,” Imelda Staunton wrote in a piece for The Guardian in 2015. Staunton, who turned 68 on January 9 amid praise for her recent incarnation of Elizabeth II in the latest season of the historical drama The Crown, is first and foremost an actress of substance, with a career that has seen her become one of Harry Potter’s most fearsome villains, Dolores Umbridge, but also collect one of the U.K. industry’s most coveted awards, a BAFTA for best actress, for her role in Vera Drake.

Staunton explained in another interview with The Guardian that her mother “dreamed of being a hairdresser on a cruise liner, seeing the world,” but, being raised Catholic, “had to get married” when she was expecting her, and to then do what all Irish immigrants did at the time: work hard. That’s why Bridie, Staunton’s mother, decided to send her daughter to a private Catholic school, to give her the education she couldn’t afford. It was there that the young Staunton discovered acting: “It was my elocution and drama teacher at school who told me I had to audition for drama school. She convinced Mum I had to be an actress. My parents came from a generation where if someone in authority told them this was what their daughter was going to do, they accepted it. They weren’t worried about me going into acting, because they didn’t know anything about it,” she told the British newspaper. At the age of 18, she was admitted to the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, where she studied: “I was introduced to a different world through theater. That was my education. We had no books in the house.”

Staunton is a discreet actress — both professionally and privately — who has managed to carve out a career thanks to her work ethic, inherited from her mother, as well as the steely values of her childhood: “I’ve drawn on Mum to play quite a lot of my strong women roles. Her work ethic was her greatest legacy,” she said. Her career started in the late 1970s in theater — which she has never left — where she garnered glowing reviews for her performances in plays such as The Beggar’s Opera or Guys and Dolls. It was during the latter play that she met her husband, actor Jim Carter, another immensely popular face on British and international television thanks to his portrayal of Mr. Carson, the butler in Downton Abbey. Staunton and Carter married in 1983 and are one of the longest-wed couples in the industry. They have a daughter, Bessie Carter, who has followed in her parents’ footsteps and is currently starring in the popular Netflix series Bridgerton.

Eventually, Staunton began to land roles in British television series and films, becoming a popular performer in the U.K., especially as a solid-gold supporting actress. She earned her international breakthrough, and fame, with two movies in the 2000s. In 2004, she took the leading role in Vera Drake, a Mike Leigh drama in which the actress played a woman of humble origins who performed clandestine abortions in the 1950s. Staunton was nominated for an Oscar and a Golden Globe for her performance, although in the end she took home only the BAFTA award. “Mum died in 2004 and dad six years later,” she wrote in The Guardian. “Mum had heart disease and went into hospital for a bypass but never survived the operation. The week after she died, I got the Oscar nomination for Vera Drake. The fact she never knew and never got to experience any of that was utterly devastating.”

In 2007, Staunton played Professor Dolores Umbridge in the film Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, reprising her character in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — Part 1 (2010). Some critics highlighted this performance as one of the most important of her career. It was certainly the most popular. At least, until Netflix cast her as Elizabeth II in The Crown, a role previously played by Claire Foy and Oscar-winner Olivia Colman. “It was a challenge,” Staunton said of her portrayal of the monarch in the fifth and sixth seasons, the only installments of the series released after the passing of Elizabeth II and whose filming was delayed as a result. “Here we are fictionalizing real events that are very close to us,” she told Sky News, as she felt that, as the series reached its denouement, the audience had stopped seeing it as a historical drama.

Despite her enormous success in film and television, Staunton’s great love remains the theater. She won her first Olivier Award — the most prestigious in British theater — in 1985 for her performances in A Chorus of Disapproval and The Corn is Green. In 1991, she received the second of her four in total for Into the Woods and went on to star in productions including Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Follies. “In my job I’m really lucky because I play all these different people and have many lives,” the actress said in a 2018 interview with The Scotsman. “But it’s also important to say OK, I need my life now. It doesn’t take much to make me happy, just a good walk with the dog, a nice holiday with my husband… I do an extraordinary job, therefore I want to do ordinary stuff.”

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