Andrea Riseborough

Andrea Riseborough grew up in Whitley Bay on the Northumberland coast and came into film through the stage, with Miss Julie and Measure for Measure in 2006 and Chekhov's Ivanov two years later. Her screen debut was a walk-on in Venus (2006). British television gave her the first real parts: a young Margaret Thatcher in The Long Walk to Finchley, which brought a BAFTA TV nomination, and the Channel 4 miniseries The Devil's Whore.

What she does works against her own recognisability. Most actors build a persona and rent it out. Riseborough builds a different body each time, and the result is that people who have seen six of her films often do not know they have seen six of her films. Wallis Simpson in W.E., an informer named Colette McVeigh in the Troubles thriller Shadow Dancer, Mandy Bloom in the heavy-metal nightmare Mandy, an assassin who works from inside other people's bodies in Possessor: no thread of mannerism connects them, only a willingness to go further into the part than the film strictly requires.

The Academy Award nomination came for To Leslie (2022), where she plays a woman drinking herself out of every room she enters. It is the least decorated performance she has given, almost all of it held in close-up.

She has never sorted her career into prestige and genre. In the same stretch of years she took the lead in Possessor, a detective in The Grudge, Mrs. Wormwood in Matilda the Musical, and ensemble parts in Birdman, The Death of Stalin and Amsterdam. She is one of the few actors of her generation who appear to choose by role rather than by tier.