Michelle Fairley

Fairley grew up in Coleraine, the second eldest of six children of a publican whose bar served both Catholics and Protestants through the Troubles, and she spent years inside the ordinary machinery of British television, The Bill, Casualty, Holby City, Inspector Morse, before anything made her famous further afield. She took over the role of Mrs. Granger for the Harry Potter films with Deathly Hallows.

Then Game of Thrones cast her as Catelyn Stark and she gave the series its most grounded performance: a woman doing political arithmetic in real time while grief works on her from underneath. Almost none of it is played on the lines. Fairley is exceptionally good at listening, and a lot of her best scenes are simply her face while somebody else talks, calculating what a piece of news is going to cost and who must not be allowed to see her react.

That has become the specialism. Margaret Beaufort in The White Princess, Princess Augusta in Queen Charlotte and Marian Wallace in Gangs of London are the same job in three costumes, the matriarch as operator, holding a family or a dynasty together through decisions nobody thanks her for. She is quieter and just as good in smaller things: Sally Mitchell in Philomena, Mrs. Wilson in Small Things Like These, Freya Lennox in Fortitude, Ava Hessington in Suits. She appears in the 2026 series How to Get to Heaven from Belfast.