Anna Chancellor


Anna Theodora Chancellor is an English actress. She has received nominations for BAFTA and Olivier Awards.

Background and early life

Chancellor was born in Richmond, London to barrister John Paget Chancellor, eldest son of Sir Christopher Chancellor, and Mary Jolliffe, a daughter of Lord Hylton. The Chancellor family were Scottish gentry who owned land at Quothquan since 1432.
Chancellor was brought up in Somerset and educated at St Mary's School, Shaftesbury, a Roman Catholic boarding school for girls in Dorset, but left at sixteen to live in London, later describing her early years there as "quite wild". In her early twenties, she became the partner of the poet Jock Scot, with whom she had her daughter, Poppy Chancellor, whilst still studying at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. She separated from Scot a few years later. She got her first acting role on television playing Mercedes Page in Jupiter Moon, a BSkyB soap, then came a commercial for Boddingtons beer and a part in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral, playing "Duckface" opposite Hugh Grant.
Chancellor is a niece of the journalist Alexander Chancellor, a great-granddaughter of Raymond Asquith, a first cousin of the model Cecilia Chancellor and a second cousin of the actress Helena Bonham Carter. Chancellor herself has spoken of her lineage, stating:

Career

Chancellor played Julia Piper in series 1 to 3 of Kavanagh QC. She also played Caroline Bingley in the 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, and Questular Rontok in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The same year, she joined the cast of BBC One television drama series Spooks as Juliet Shaw. She has also appeared in The Vice, Karaoke, Cold Lazarus, The Dreamers, Tipping the Velvet and Fortysomething, and had a leading role in the satirical black comedy Suburban Shootout. In 2011, she took a supporting role in the BBC thriller serial The Hour, for which she was nominated for the British Academy Television Award for Best Supporting Actress.
In 1997, she received a Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role nomination for her performance in Stanley and in 2013 an Olivier Award for Best Actress nomination for her part in Private Lives.

Charity

She is a patron of the London children's charity Scene & Heard.

Filmography

Theatre

Chancellor has played the role of Ann Smiley in a BBC dramatisation of the John le Carré novels The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People.

Ancestry