Joanne Froggatt
Joanne Froggatt is an actor, born 1980.
Downton Abbey is why most people know her name, and it is worth being precise about what she actually did in it. Anna is the servant the audience is asked to trust, which sounds like the easy job and is not. The writing put her through more sustained misery than anyone else in the house, and the role only functions if the decency reads as a choice rather than as a temperament. Froggatt plays it as effort. She was nominated for three Emmys and won the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress in 2014, and she has returned to Anna in every film continuation, from the 2019 Downton Abbey through A New Era and The Grand Finale.
She had been working for well over a decade before that: Zoe Tattersall on Coronation Street in the late 1990s, then Sigourney in dinnerladies, Lizzie Ridd in Lorna Doone, Gail Maitland in Rebus, and Ruth Tyler in Life on Mars, mother to a detective who has come unstuck in time.
The post-Downton career has been deliberately harder. Liar gave her Laura Nielson and a premise built entirely on whether an audience believes a woman, which makes for unpleasant, effective television. Sherwood, Last Light and MobLand have kept her in adult drama. On film there is Mary in Filth, Kelly in Still Life, Val in A Street Cat Named Bob, and Mary Jane Clairmont in Mary Shelley.
Movies (10)
TV (9)
Where to start with Joanne Froggatt
Downton Abbey first, obviously, and specifically the early series, where Anna's storyline is still built out of small things and the show has not yet started reaching for catastrophe. It is the best-known work and, unusually, close to her best.
Liar is the one to watch next if you want the harder version. A two-hander premise stretched across a series, frequently uncomfortable, and Froggatt carries almost all of it.
Life on Mars is the deep cut worth digging out, a small role in an excellent series. Sherwood is the most serious drama she has done, drawn from real events in a Nottinghamshire mining community, and MobLand is the newest and the loudest.
On film, Still Life is quietly the best thing on this list, a slow and precise picture about a council officer who arranges funerals for the unclaimed. Filth and A Street Cat Named Bob are the broader options.