Eleanor Tomlinson
Eleanor Tomlinson is an actor, born 1992.
Eleanor Tomlinson was working before she was old enough to drive. Born in London and raised in East Yorkshire, she played the young Sophie in The Illusionist in 2006, was Jas, the best friend, in Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging two years later, and turned up in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland at the start of the next decade. The obvious next step, a Hollywood fantasy lead, arrived in 2013 with Jack the Giant Slayer, and it did not take.
British television is where she actually became something. The White Queen gave her Isabel Neville, a woman used as a bargaining chip by everyone related to her, and Tomlinson found the resentment underneath it. Then Poldark, from 2015 to 2019, and Demelza: a kitchen maid who marries up and spends the entire run being condescended to by people she is plainly smarter than. It is the performance her career rests on, and the reason is that she plays social humiliation without ever letting the character look small.
Since then she has gone deliberately wide. Amy in the BBC's War of the Worlds, Gabby in The Outlaws, the wartime drama A Small Light, thrillers in Ordeal by Innocence and The Couple Next Door, comedy in Love Wedding Repeat, and a hand-painted turn as Adeline Ravoux in Loving Vincent, where every frame is an oil painting. The Forsytes and The Fortune keep the period lane open.
Movies (12)
TV (12)
Where to start with Eleanor Tomlinson
Poldark, and specifically its first two series, is the entry point. Demelza starts as a servant the show could easily have used as decoration, and Tomlinson plays her with such a clear line of self-respect that the balance of the whole series tips toward her. If that lands, the rest of the list makes sense.
Go backwards next, to The White Queen, for the colder version of the same idea: a woman with no power except who she is married to. Then The Outlaws for comedy, the register people forget she has, and The War of the Worlds if you want her carrying genre material outright. Loving Vincent is the curiosity worth an evening on its technique alone. Jack the Giant Slayer is skippable unless you are curious what the studio version of her career would have looked like.