Charity Wakefield


Charity Rose Wakefield is an English actress.

Early life and education

Wakefield was born 18 September 1980 in Sussex, England. At a couple of months old she moved with her mother Caroline to Villajoyosa, a small village near Alicante in Comunidad Valenciana, Spain. They returned to East Sussex, England, when Wakefield was four. She has a half-sister, Olivia, who is seven years younger. Her maternal grandfather was actor James Hayter.
Wakefield went to Bexhill College, and studied acting at the Oxford School of Drama from 2000 to 2003. As well as acting, she plays the violin and has a strong soprano singing voice.

Career

Charity began her acting career back in 1987 while taking part in an amateur dramatics school production of "Sleeping Beauty", co-starring Lee Taylor of Ninfield, East Sussex. Wakefield and Taylor played key roles, and Taylor stepped in to fill the lead role after an unexpected sickness. Wakefield made her screen debut in 2004, in Imperfect. She starred in a BBC1 production of Rapunzel, in which Rapunzel is a young tennis star, and also appeared in Casualty 1907.
Her theatre credits include Yesterday Was a Weird Day, a production about the 2005 London bombings, Constance in The Three Musketeers at the Bristol Old Vic, and Elaine in The Graduate, at the New Vic; she first met her future husband, David Newman, when they acted together in The Graduate. Wakefield's performance as Susan in Baby with the Bathwater at the Old Red Lion Theatre was called "fabulous."
In 2008 she toured in a revival of W. Somerset Maugham's The Circle at the Chichester Festival Theatre, as well as working on the BBC comedy pilot Freddi.
She appeared in the Channel 4 drama Any Human Heart and played the lead in the British film noir Scar Tissue. In March 2012 she was cast in Mockingbird Lane, the re-imagining of The Munsters for NBC.
She appeared as Mary Boleyn in the 2015 BBC2 television series Wolf Hall. She also appeared in the NBC drama The Player with Philip Winchester and Wesley Snipes.
On Christmas Day 2016, she was one of the principal guest stars in the BBC1 Doctor Who Christmas Special: The Return of Doctor Mysterio.
In 2017, she appeared in two episodes of the ITV drama The Halcyon, playing Charity Lambert. Wakefield appeared in the main cast of both series of the Sky One comedy drama Bounty Hunters, playing Leah Hoover, sister of the character of series co-creator and co-lead Jack Whitehall.

Filmography

Film

Television