Justine Waddell
For roughly five years in the late 1990s, if a British broadcaster was adapting a nineteenth century novel, Justine Waddell was on the shortlist. She was Tess in the 1998 LWT version of Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Estella in the BBC's 1999 Great Expectations, Molly Gibson in Wives and Daughters, Laura Fairlie in The Woman In White, Julia Bertram in Mansfield Park and Countess Nordston in Anna Karenina. That is most of the canon inside one run, and it is a very particular kind of casting: the watchful, intelligent young woman the plot is about to do wrong.
She is South African and British, and she left the corsets earlier than that run would predict. Dracula 2000 put her in a studio horror picture as Mary Heller. Chaos made her a detective. The Fall gave her a nurse inside a film that is mostly a child's imagination, which is the most visually extreme thing on her filmography. The Mystery of Natalie Wood asked her to play Natalie Wood, a harder assignment than any of the Victorians.
Acting is now one of several things she does. She works as a film producer, and she founded and directs Klassiki, a streaming platform. The later acting credits here, Killing Bono and Target, read as occasional rather than as a career, which appears to be the point.
Movies (12)
TV (1)
Where to start with Justine Waddell
The fullest thing she has ever been handed is Tess of the D'Urbervilles: three hours of a young woman who is acted upon relentlessly, played with a stubbornness that keeps the whole thing from curdling into a Victorian pity party. Watch that first.
Wives and Daughters is the better watch, though, and the one to reach for on a wet weekend. Molly Gibson is a warmer, funnier part than Tess or Estella, and the adaptation around her is one of the best the BBC made in that decade. Great Expectations is worth it for the contrast: Estella is written as a closed door, and playing closed doors is harder than it looks.
After the classics, The Fall is the one that surprises people, a film shot in real locations across two dozen countries where she is the calm centre of something enormous. Dracula 2000 is the guilty pleasure and should be treated as such.