Categories: 1958 births | English actors | Cinema actors

Miranda Richardson

Miranda Richardson (Born 3 March 1958, in Southport, Lancashire) is a British actress. The second daughter of middle-class parents, she had a talent for acting from an early age.

Richardson had originally intended to study veterinary medicine, but her squeamishness made this impossible. She enrolled at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, where she studied alongside Daniel Day-Lewis. In 1981, she made her stage debut in Moving at the Queen's Theatre in London.

Three years later, she made her big screen debut as platinum blonde nightclub hostess Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in the United Kingdom in Mike Newell's critically acclaimed biographical drama, Dance with a Stranger. Her performance in that film won her much praise, and within a year, she had been cast by Steven Spielberg to appear in his World War II drama Empire of the Sun (1987).

Richardson is perhaps best known for her role as the naughty school girl version of Queen Elizabeth I, aka Queenie, in the cult British comedy Blackadder. Other television roles include the bitchy Pamela Flitton in A Dance to the Music of Time (1997), Miss Gilchrist in St. Ives (1998), Bettina (the obsessive compulsive interior decorator) in Absolutely Fabulous and Queen Mary in The Lost Prince (2003).

As well as a number of high profile supporting roles in the cinema, including Vanessa Bell in The Hours, Lady Van Tassel in Sleepy Hollow and Toosie in The Apostle, she has also won acclaim for performances in The Crying Game and Enchanted April, for which she won a Golden Globe.

Two Academy Award nominations (for Damage and Tom & Viv) have not altered the actress's modesty. She refuses to discuss her private life in interviews, and takes both leading and supporting roles.

More recently, Richardson has played Queen Rosalind of Denmark in the Julia Stiles vehicle The Prince and Me, and the ballet mistress Madame Giry in the long-awaited film version of The Phantom of the Opera, starring Gerard Butler and Emmy Rossum. She has since signed on to appear as Rita Skeeter, the venomous Daily Prophet journalist in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, to be released in November 2005.