She was born in Harlow, Essex, to Peter and Karen. She has a younger sister and brother. Spencer said of her background "I come from a working class background; my dad’s a builder and my mum works in a school". She started ballet aged 3 and has wanted to perform since then. At the age of 11, her parents sent her to a drama school in London, at the Sylvia Young Theatre School in Marylebone. Charlotte's parents remortgaged their house to support her acting career. As of 2016 she lives with her parents when not working as an actor, working with her grandmother at a charity shop and helping with the choir at her mother's infants school. She has a dog, Chip.
Acting career
Theatre
She got her acting break in Mary Poppins aged 12, appearing as Jane Banks in Richard Eyre's 2004 production of the musical. In 2009, she played Bet in Oliver!. In 2013, Eyre again cast Spencer, this time as Christine Keeler in the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Stephen Ward, alongside Charlotte Blackledge as Mandy Rice-Davies. The show run was cancelled shortly afterwards.
Television and film
Spencer appeared as Dexter Fletcher's daughter in Hotel Babylon. She was the voice of Angelina Ballerina on when she was 17, and has since worked as a voice actor, as Nettles in the 2018 TV seriesWatership Down and as a continuity announcer for the Disney Channel. Spencer appeared in the films Wild Bill and Les Misérables in 2011 and then Dark Shadows with Johnny Depp in 2012. After her theatre appearance as Christine Keeler ended, Spencer had a small part in Line of Duty and then was cast by the same director as jockey Tina Fallon in the 2014 E4 TV series Glue. She was nominated for a Supporting ActressBAFTA for this role in 2015. Deadline Hollywood reported that she would star in Broad Squad; in 2015 she appeared in a pilot of Broad Squad as a 1970s police officer on ABC, which was not made into a series. She starred as 'Niamh' in the BFI short, Above, which won Best Short Film at the National Film Awards UK. She played the lead role, Lilly, in the film Bypass with George MacKay and appeared as Ellie in the BBC2 TV series Stonemouth. In 2015, she was nominated for best actress awards for Stonemouth at BAFTA Scotland. In the BBC1 horror TV series The Living and the Dead, broadcast in June 2016, she played the role of a photographer turned housewife, Charlotte Appelby, with Colin Morgan. She said of the role "since I was a child, I’ve always wanted to do a period drama". She appeared in another period drama in autumn 2019, as Esther Denham in Sanditon, a TV adaptation of the unfinished Jane Austen novel. She defended the inclusion of sex and nudity as historically accurate and "humanising". In May 2016, she filmed the BBC/NFTS short filmDiagnosis in the lead role of Sally, a woman who acts in medical role play. Spencer will also play a hapless youth in the teen horror film Gateway, which uses the Momo Challenge as a plot device.
