Dakota Blue Richards
Dakota Blue Richards is an actor, born 1994.
Richards made her film debut at thirteen, in the lead. She played Lyra Belacqua in The Golden Compass, which is a great deal of film to hand a first-timer: a fantasy adaptation with an enormous cast and a heroine who is on screen for most of it. She was good in it, and the film's problems were not hers.
The follow-ups were smaller. She was April in the television film Dustbin Baby, which is not among the credits listed here, and Maria Merryweather in The Secret of Moonacre, another children's fantasy that did not travel.
The interesting move was Skins. Joining the third-generation cast as Franky Fitzgerald in 2011 meant walking into a show whose audience had already adopted two previous casts, in a format that chewed through its leads, playing a character defined by not fitting in. It is the performance with the most range on this list.
Since then, television: WPC Shirley Trewlove in Endeavour, a period detective series where she is one of the few characters allowed to be straightforwardly decent. The record we hold is short, four credits, and it says nothing about what she has been doing between them.
Movies (2)
TV (2)
Where to start with Dakota Blue Richards
Take Skins first, specifically the third-generation episodes, and go straight to the ones centred on Franky. The series runs on a rota, each episode belonging to one character, so you can sample her without signing up for the whole thing. It is the best acting she has been given room to do.
The Golden Compass is the famous credit, worth seeing for her rather than for the film, which compresses a dense book into two hours and loses its shape doing it. She is the reason it holds together at all.
The Secret of Moonacre is a children's fantasy with plenty of charm and very little budget. Endeavour is the grown-up television, handsome, slow and reliably good company; her constable is one of the warmer presences in it.