Ruth Jones

Writing and performing are usually different careers, and the interesting thing about Ruth Jones is how little she treats them as such. She was a working character actress through the 1990s and early 2000s, in small film parts (Emma, East Is East) and then in a remarkable stretch of British comedy: Myfanwy in Little Britain, Linda in Nighty Night, Magz in Saxondale, Kelly Chadwick in Fat Friends. Four of the sharpest comedies of the era, and she is the lead in none of them.

Then she co-wrote Gavin & Stacey and gave herself Vanessa Jenkins. It is one of the great British sitcom creations, a woman who delivers an implausible past in the flattest available voice and never once asks to be believed, and Jones plays her without a trace of the winking that a writer casting herself usually cannot resist. She won the BAFTA for Best Female Comedy Performance for it in 2025. She also co-wrote and led Stella, a Welsh comedy drama that ran from 2012 to 2017 and brought her BAFTA and BAFTA Cymru nominations, one of them for the screenwriting.

The straight acting has never stopped, and it is better than her comedy reputation suggests. She is Flora Finching in Little Dorrit and Joan Durbeyfield in Tess of the D'Urbervilles, two characters written to be funny on the page and pitiable underneath, which is precisely her range. Run Away and The Other Bennet Sister are both listed here for 2026.