Miranda Richardson

The risk of not being the lead

In 1985, Miranda Richardson didn't ask for permission to break into British cinema. She appeared in Dance with a Stranger as Ruth Ellis, the last woman executed in the United Kingdom, and left critics speechless with a chilling coldness that took your breath away.

Before that premiere, she had already spent years training at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. But it was that biographical role that pulled her out of obscurity and put her directly on the radar of major European directors.

Shortly after, she accepted the role of Queen Elizabeth I in the series Blackadder II. That whimsical, somewhat unhinged Queenie broke with the image of intense drama actress that many had pinned on her after her debut.

And the gamble paid off.

In 1992, she shot Damage under the direction of Louis Malle. Her portrayal of the deceived wife was so powerful that it managed to overshadow Jeremy Irons and Juliette Binoche in nearly all of their shared scenes.

Nobody expected that change of pace.

That same year, she took part in The Crying Game and Enchanted April. For the first she won a BAFTA Award for Best Supporting Actress, while for the second she took home a Golden Globe, proving she could move from political thriller to light comedy without missing a beat.

The obsession with physical detail

In 1994 she earned her second Oscar nomination for Tom & Viv. In this film she played Vivienne Haigh-Wood with a fragility that never slipped into cheap sentimentality (something very common in the period dramas of the nineties).

She worked with Robert Altman on Kansas City in 1996 and with Tim Burton in Sleepy Hollow in 1999. In Burton's film, she played Lady Van Tassel, and her on-screen presence recalled the silent-era villainesses with its exaggerated expressiveness.

The public simply didn't recognize her.

Richardson has always preferred to disappear behind her characters rather than fuel her own fame. So she had no trouble accepting smaller but juicy parts, like the gossip journalist Rita Skeeter in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in 2005.

In 2017 she joined the cast of Stronger, a film about the Boston Marathon bombing. She played the protagonist's mother, and her performance was nominated by Boston critics as one of the year's best.

In 2019 she joined the series Good Omens to play Madame Tracy. Four years later, in 2023, she returned for the second season of the same production with a completely different character named Shax.

In 2023, she voiced the villainous Mrs. Tweedy in the animated film Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget. The estimated budget of this Aardman production for Netflix exceeded 40 million dollars.