As The Roses tops the UK box-office charts, Cinema Paradiso gets to know one half of its duelling duo, Olivia Colman.
An unnecessarily snide article in a magazine with a proud history recently complained that Olivia Colman keeps recurring like a particularly nasty form of bacterial infection. But there's a very good reason the prolific actress keeps cropping up everywhere - she's bloody good!
With her mantelpiece already over-crowded, Colman is soon going to need a trophy cabinet in order to store all of the awards she has garnered. But, for the last 25 years, she has been delivering winning performances in everything from sketch shows to Marvel spin-offs and from crime thrillers to costume dramas.
She's instantly recognisable in every role, but each characterisation is instinctively intimate and distinctly different. It's hard to think of another British actress with such an enviable range. And, with any luck, there's still plenty more to come...
From the Broads to the Boards
Sarah Caroline Colman was born in Norwich on 30 January 1974. Father Keith was a chartered surveyor, while mother Mary (née Leakey) was a nurse and her grandfather was a postman called Pat. When she appeared on Who Do You Think You Are? in 2018, the researchers speculated that Harriot Slessor, the wife of her third great-grandfather Charles Bazett, might have had an Indian mother, as she had been born in the city of Kishanganj. However, the Berkshire Record Office later discovered that Harriot's mother, Seraphina Donclere, had been of European origin.
As Keith's work involved renovating houses across Norfolk, Colman estimates that she moved 17 times and that her parents had relocated on over 30 occasions. She described her early life as 'absolutely heavenly', telling The Independent, 'I had a lovely, feral, free childhood - out and then come back when you're hungry or it gets too dark.' She confirmed this viewpoint in Vogue: 'I had a nice, outdoorsy childhood - lots of camping, lots of walks on very wet beaches with anoraks.' Her TV memories were largely in black and white, with The Two Ronnies (1971-86), Knight Rider (1982-85, and Doctor Who (1963-) among her favourites.
Colman also remembered a visit to the cinema with her grandmother to see Disney's Bambi (1942). 'When Bambi's mummy got done in,' she recalled, 'I think I had to be taken out of the cinema, and I didn't go back for years. Quite an emotional child. Hard as nails now, obviously.' Despite this experience, she harboured an ambition to become an actress, although it was 'a secret dream, like talking to animals'. As she later mused, 'It felt like being a circus performer - if you didn't do it from childhood, how could you?'
She did have an adventurous streak, however, driving her first car at the age of 12, when she sat on her father's lap at the wheel in a North Norfolk field. By the age of 16, she had an official rally licence that entitled her to compete in races. Her first car was a 1948 Morris Minor that she dubbed 'Moomin' and she drove it between Cambridge and home with a raspberry coloured grille that she claimed looked like lipstick.
Having been privately educated at Norwich High School for Girls. Colman entered the sixth form at Gresham's School in Holt. Here, the 16 year-old 'Colly' (or 'Collie'), as she was known, landed the lead in a school production of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which had earned Maggie Smith the Oscar for Best Actress in 1970. She found the play so thrilling that she knew immediately what she wanted to do with her life. 'I was so s**t at everything at school,' she later joked, 'but I did the play and thought, "Oh, I like this!"...I was quite a jolly kid, but not particularly confident, and suddenly being someone else was amazing.'
Beyond the Footlights
Although Colman applied to do a teacher training course at Homerton College in Cambridge, she still had ambitions to act. Using her student card, she auditioned for the famous Footlights Dramatic Club, whose previous members had included Peter Cook, Pythons John Cleese, Graham Chapman, and Eric Idle, and Stephen Fry. On being told, 'Find something in here and try to sell it to us,' Colman picked up a cigarette butt and waxed lyrical about its nutritional value before proceeding to eat it. Rather than laughing, the panel looked shocked, but Colman was accepted and she later claimed, 'I suddenly found all these people who were a bit weird and a bit shy, like me.'
Although she only stuck her course for a term, Colman felt so at home in Cambridge that she took a job as a cleaner and hunkered down with such fellow Footlighters as Robert Webb and David Mitchell. In 1995, she used the name 'Colly' to appear on the Channel 4 series, The Word, but she largely stuck to student productions with friends, as she was as much intent on having fun as building a reputation.
While acting in a Footlights production of Alan Ayckbourn's Table Manners, Colman met third-year law student, Ed Sinclair. He had a crush on the director, but Colman had no doubts about their future. 'For me, it was thunderbolts straight away,' she later recalled. 'I'm going to marry him. A bit weird I know, but yes. He was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.'
On completing his degree, Sinclair landed a place at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School and Colman convinced him to let her come along, too. 'I was heart-broken that it would all end there,' she told a journalist. 'So I said I'd come along and I could support him.' She kept cleaning and worked as a temp to pay the bills, although the incessant theatre chatter with Sinclair's friends left her thinking, 'This is where I should be - I want to be part of it.'
Colman applied the following year and was accepted. She flourished in her new surroundings, which had also been familiar to Jeremy Irons, Pete Postlethwaite, Amanda Redman, Miranda Richardson, Helen Baxendale, Samantha Bond, and Daniel Day-Lewis. In 1998, the couple relocated to London, although it proved quite a wrench, as Colman explained. 'We had what we call our Angela's Ashes day when we first moved to London from Bristol. I had £1 left in my overdraft and cash machines don't dispense pounds. Ed didn't have any money either, so we managed to find enough pennies from the sofa to buy one potato to share.'
While finding their feet, Colman and Sinclair spent two months in a friend's attic in Epping. Colman also discovered that there was already an actress named Sarah Colman registered with Equity. So, she had to come up with a new name. 'One of my best friends at university was called Olivia,' she told The Independent years later, 'and I always loved her name. I was never Sarah; I was always called by my nickname, Colly, so it didn't seem so awful not to be called Sarah.'
In 1999, Sinclair received an inheritance that enabled the couple to buy a £90,000 two-bedroom flat in East Dulwich. They would sell it two years later for £150,000, by which time, they were married and Sinclair was devoting more time to writing than acting, 'I think he was quite relieved,' Colman opined in an interview, 'because he always wanted to write and he's brilliant at it.' After an initial struggle, she started to get parts and felt 'lucky enough to pay the rent for both of us'. As she told the Daily Mail, as a mother of three and a household name, 'It's not fair if I'm living the dream and he's not...The important thing is to appreciate and love each other and to show that appreciation.' As they approach their silver wedding, the Sinclairs are among the happiest couples in showbiz.
That Mitchell and Webb Phase
Despite securing the services of agent, Lindy King, Colman found professional life tough going. She 'put me up for a hundred auditions and I didn't get a single one. So I'm very appreciative of work,' Colman said looking back on her first year as an actor. 'My mum had said, "You'll probably give it a year." And I said, "No, I'll give it 10 years."'
Colman has since said about success, 'I'm also very grateful for the years I didn't work. You know, it's not a quick thing. I'd have a theatre job and then go back into temping, or whatever I could do to earn money and then a little theatre job.' She claimed her best feature as a secretary was being 'cheery'. while she always took great pride in cleaning houses so that they were nice to live in. But she was always forthright about her ultimate aim: 'I never wanted to do anything else. Also, I'm no good at anything else.'
In one interview, she admitted: 'I definitely remember being like, "Oh my God, it's never going to work!" There were definitely days like that. But you know, sometimes I think about how my friends from drama school, some of them were so much better than me and it just didn't work for them. It's a mystery, it will always be a mystery that I won't understand: that one person's luck and one person's lack of luck could make or break it. And I'm very lucky these days because the longer you work and the more you're trusted, people go, "Oh, okay, well we've got that role, we could try it for you." And I suppose the older you get as well, the fewer of you there are.'
Olivia Colman made her professional acting bow at the age of 26 in the BBC Two comedy sketch show, Bruiser. David Mitchell, Robert Webb, and Martin Freeman were among her co-stars, while the writers included Ricky Gervais, Richard Ayoade, and Matthew Holness. It's not currently available to rent, but Cinema Paradiso users can play 'Spot Olivia' in People Like Us (1999-2001), The Office (2001-03), and Look Around You (2002-05). She also cropped up in an episode of Holby City in 2002.
Most significantly, Colman was recruited by her erstwhile Footlights buddies for The Mitchell and Webb Situation (2001). Indeed, she joined Mitchell in his touring adaptation of Molière's The Miser and, one night, struggled valiantly against corpsing at the sight of his unwieldy bow-tie before wetting herself on stage.
Clearly Mitchell forgave Colman, as not only did he recall the incident in a book, but he also gave her a big break in 2003 after recruiting her for That Mitchell and Webb Sound (2003-05). She was busy enough, appearing in such BBC Radio 4 comedies as Concrete Cow, Think the Unthinkable, The House of Milton Jones, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, and Hut 33, in which she played Minka, the Polish secretary in a code-breaking hut at Bletchley Park. In addition to voicing adverts for Andrex and Glade air fresheners. she also co-starred with Mark Burdis in the 'Kev and Bev' commercials for AA car insurance. Although it made her instantly recognisable, the role quickly outstayed its welcome. 'AA! That has become the bane of my life,' she told a reporter. 'I thought they were going to run that for about a week but they ran it for what felt like four times a day for a year. It was really annoying. I lost some jobs.'
However, Colman became less reliant on such gigs after being cast as Sophie Chapman in the Channel 4 classic, Peep Show (2003-15). Starting out as the girlfriend of socially awkward office bod, Mark Corrigan (Mitchell) - who shares a Croydon flat with workshy aspiring musician, Jeremy Usbourne (Webb) - Sophie would eventually raise her expectation levels. Created by Andrew O'Connor, Jesse Armstrong, and Sam Bain, the show rethought the sitcom and Colman featured in 32 of its 54 episodes over nine seasons, as Sophie outgrew Mark and broke off their engagement.
But it was agent Lindy King who suggested a more amicable parting of the ways, as she was concerned that Colman was becoming too fixed in the public mind with Mitchell and Webb. She admits there were tears, but Colman recognised that she had to start spreading her wings, as the offers had suddenly started to flood in.
Branching Out
Over the next few years, no self-respecting comedy would dream of billing itself in Radio Times without Colman in the cast or on the guest list. She played Tanya in Black Books, Linda Byron in Swiss Toni, and Lucy in NY-Lon (all 2004). Moreover, she started a two-year shift as Harriet Schulenburg in the cult Channel 4 medical series, Green Wing (2004-06).
After 18 stressed episodes trapped in a loveless four-child marriage and in the human resources department at East Hampton Hospital, Colman was cast as Ellie in the 'Golden Oldies' episode of Murder in Suburbia (2004-05) and as Ursula in the 2005 Shakespeare Re-Told version of Much Ado About Nothing. She ventured into films by voicing Sheila, the title character's preoccupied and rather kinky mother in Ray Gillon's animation, Terkel's in Trouble. Then, having gone in front of the camera to play a TV producer in Jayson Rothwell's Ed Byrne vehicle. Zemanovaload (both 2004), Colman returned to the safer haven of the BBC sketch show, That Mitchell and Webb Look (2006-08).
She also became reacquainted with Martin Freeman in an episode of The Robinsons (2005) before hooking up with Robert Webb to spend a lot of time stark naked together as naturists Joanna and Michael competing for a dream wedding in Debbie Isitt's improv romp, Confetti (2006), which Colman has since described as 'the worst experience of my life'. Things improved, however, during a six-episode stint as Amanda in The Time of Your Life (2007), while she also showed well as Penny in an episode of Love Soup, as Janet and Violetta in Dan Zeff's Consuming Passion: 100 Years of Mills and Boon, and as Marion in Richard Laxton's Hancock and Joan (all 2008), which chronicled the affair between comedian Tony Hancock (Ken Stott) and Joan Le Mesurier (Maxine Peake), the wife of his best friend.
In 2007, Colman reunited with Laxton, as Alice, one of the Merseysiders getting to know the migrants who have been given allotments near their patch in Grow Your Own, before upstaging Simon Pegg and Mark Frost, as PC Doris Thatcher, the genial, but foul-mouthed policewoman in the Gloucestershire village of Sandford in Edgar Wright's Hot Fuzz. She also rubbed shoulders with Michelle Pfeiffer as a hairdresser in Amy Heckerling's I Could Never Be Your Woman, which was her first American venture.
The following year saw Colman guest alongside David Mitchell on Would I Lie to You? before she took the role of Debbie, the mother of Simon Doonan (Luke Ward-Wilkinson), in Beautiful People, a BBC sitcom based on the Reading childhood of the creative director of the Barneys department store in New York. She was also on maternal duty as Gina Campbell in the 'Naomi' episode of Skins before she came under suspicion as Bernice in the 'Small Mercies' episode of Midsomer Murders. And she stayed on ITV to play Beth Paley, the sister of sexually confused newlywed Saz (Michelle Ryan) in Mister Eleven (all 2009), which ended a year that had started with a five-month 'dry spell' that had prompted Colman to investigate midwifery courses.
It was back to the Beeb, however, to essay Prisoner Zero/Mother in 'The Eleventh Hour', the 2010 episode of Doctor Who that saw Matt Smith debut in the Tardis. The action was a bit more sedate, as Colman teamed with Tom Hollander to play Alex Smallbone, the wife of an inner-city vicar, across 19 episodes of the popular sitcom, Rev However, Colman was about to demonstrate a side to her screen persona that no one had previously suspected.
Having played Olivia, the long-suffering wife of an Arctic Monkeys roadie in Shane Meadows's Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee - which was filmed in just five days for £48,000 - Colman teamed with Paddy Considine on Tyrannosaur (2011). He had directed her and Peter Mullan in the 2007 short, Dog Altogether, and Colman found herself in another abusive relationship as James (Eddie Marsan) takes exception to the fact that his Christian shopkeeper wife, Hannah, had shown some compassion to troubled widower, Joseph (Mullan). After the film won the Special Jury Prize the British Independent Film Awards, Colman took the BIFA prize for Best Performance by an Actress in a British Independent Film and the Empire Award for Best Actress. Over the next decade, the awards just kept coming.
Awards Magnet
Although she took occasional stage roles and was increasingly in demand for films, Colman's bread and butter remained television. Having teamed with John Simm and Jim Broadbent to play Alzheimer's carer Nancy Ronstadt in the three-part drama, Exile (2010), she played secretary Sally Owens to Huge Bonneville's Olympic Deliverance Commission chief, Ian Fletcher, in the mockumentary series, Twenty Twelve (2011-12), which earned Colman the BAFTA for Best Female Comedy Performance. Changing tack, she co-starred with Anne-Marie Duff in 'Mo and Sue's Story', a gang-related episode of Jimmy McGovern's courtroom anthology series, Accused (2010-12), which brought her the BAFTA for Best Supporting Actress.
She also hooked up with Sharon Horgan and Julia Davies to play the Cauldwell sisters in the pilot for Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong's proposed post-Peep Show sitcom, Bad Sugar (2012). A series was commissioned, but it had to be scrapped because the stars were too busy with other projects. Colman had been voicing Homily for the English-language version of Hiromasa Yonebayashi's anime, Arrietty, as well as playing Carol Thatcher opposite the Oscar-winning Meryl Streep in Phyllida Law's The Iron Lady (both 2011). Staying in biopic mode, Colman had also been cast as Queen Elizabeth alongside Samuel West's George VI for a 1939 visit to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Bill Murray) in Roger Michell's Hyde Park on Hudson (2012). As a result of her efforts, the London Film Critics' Circle named her British Actress of the Year.
Still on the big screen, Colman was Linda, the therapist trying to guide newlyweds Nat (Rose Byrne) and Josh (Rafe Spall) through some teething troubles in Dan Mazer's I Give It a Year, while she was heard but not seen as Bethan Maguire, the pregnant work colleague of construction foreman, Ivan Locke (Tom Hardy), in Steven Knight's Locke. Back on the box, she reunited with Paddy Considine to play Susan Spencer in The Suspicions of Mr Whicher: The Murder In Angel Lane before cropping up as Carol in two episodes of the Channel 4 drama, Run. Also in 2013, she co-starred with Vanessa Redgrave as biographer Margaret Lea and famous novelist Vida Winter in Christopher Hampton's adaptation of Diane Setterfield's Gothic novel, The Thirteenth Tale.
The most significant development of 2013, however, was Colman's casting as DS Ellie Miller alongside David Tennant's DI Alec Hardy and Jodie Whitaker's grieving mother, Beth Latimer, in Broadchurch (2013-17), which centred on the investigation into the suspicious death of an 11 year-old boy in a coastal Dorset town. In addition to winning the BAFTA for Best Actress in a Drama, Colman was also nominated for the International Emmy Award for Best Actress.
Over the course of 24 episodes over the next four years, Tennant became a firm Colman fan. 'It can be quite hard to pinpoint where Olivia ends and where her characters begin,' he claimed, while Whitaker averred that she was 'one of the only actors who can make you laugh and cry at the same time. She brings such humour and vulnerability and playfulness to everything.' But Colman was just getting started, as 2014 became the busiest year of her career to date.
Having guested as Sally Owens in an episode of the Twenty Twelve spin-off, W1A (2014-17), Colman played Pippa, a vet contemplating whether to consent to the assisted death of her cancer-stricken mother (Alison Steadman), in 'The Dilemma', the first episode of Secrets. Then, as mother-of-two Maggie Matthews, she was betrayed by her commuter husband (David Morrissey) after a trainboard flirtation with a stranger (Sheridan Smith) in David Nicholls's BBC drama, The 7:39 (both 2014).
Voiceover gigs followed, as Nelly the Horse in Nick Moore's Pudsey the Dog: The Movie and as Marion the steam shovel in Thomas & Friends: Tale of the Brave (2014) and Thomas & Friends: Sodor's Legend of the Lost Treasure (2015), as well as in nine episodes of the linked series, Thomas & Friends (2014-18). She then shook a tail feather as salsa champion-turned-dance teacher, Sam Garrett, helping brother Bruc (Nick Frost) remember his forgotten moves in James Griffith's Cuban Fury.
Frost was also Colman's co-star in Mr Sloane, as Janet, the Watford wife of a depressed accountant who rediscovers his joie de vivre after meeting a free-spirited American hardware shop assistant (Ophelia Lovibond). Having guested as lady of the manor, Joan Jenkins, in 'The Garden Woggle' episode of the Channel Island sitcom, This Is Jinsy (2011-14), Colman was more poignantly memorable as Sarah, the mother with a rare condition that causes her to float ever upwards in Oscar Sharp's short. The Kármán Line.
In 2015, Colman was cast as the manager of the hotel at which Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz stay while looking for love in Yorgos Lanthimos's The Lobster, an absurdist allegory that won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes. It also earned Colman the BIFA for Best Supporting Actress. She also impressed as Julie a resident of the Ipswich area in which a serial killer targeted prostitutes in Rufus Norris's London Road, which was adapted from an acclaimed National Theatre musical. However, television would again dominate the following year, as Colman took on roles as different as the narrator of The Secret Life of the Zoo and Dr Crippen's mistress, Ethel Le Neve, in an episode of Drunken History (both 2015).
She joined Julian Barratt to play music teacher Deborah to his children's author, Maurice, in Will Sharpe's sitcom, Flowers (2016-18), but made more of an impact as the artist godmother with designs on becoming a stepmother in nine episodes of the cult BBC comedy, Fleabag (2016-19). Creator and co-star, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, was lost in admiration for her co-star 'I will always aspire to her level of brilliance, but I've been equally inspired by who she is as a person and a professional. Work hard, and be nice to people. And don't take yourself too seriously. And karaoke. I say those are the secrets to being as close to Olivia Colman as possible. Oh - and be hysterically funny and a genre-defying acting genius.' Which sort of sums it up, really.
As does the fact that Colman was pregnant when she played Foreign Office task force manager Angela Burr in The Night Manager (2016), Susanne Bier's adaptation of a John Le Carré spy novel. A third series has been commissioned, with Colman having confirmed that she will return alongside Tom Hiddleston, as Jonathan Pine, the Cairo hotel manager with a double life. So good was Colman in the first three-part series that she was nominated for the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie, while also winning the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress in a Series, Miniseries or Television Film.
Still finding time to voice Mum for a festive animated take on Michael Rosen's We're Going on a Bear Hunt (2016), Colman also squeezed in narrating stints on Inside Dior, Flatpack Empire, and Natural World (all 2017), while also voicing Strawberry in Noam Murro's take on Richard Adams's Watership Down (2018), which had also been animated by Martin Rosen in 1978.
In cinemas, she played Hildegarde Schmidt, the maid of Princess Natalia Dragomiroff (Judi Dench), in Kenneth Branagh's 2017 version of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, which had been filmed by Sidney Lumet in 1974, with Rachel Roberts and Wendy Hiller in the same roles. The year also saw Colman decide to take a sabbatical from the theatre because she wanted to tuck in her three children each night and because her stage fright had become debilitating. 'I get genuinely terrified: panic attack, dry mouth,' she told one reporter, as she explained how the fear that had previously manifested itself as adrenaline was now 'just fear'. Fortunately, she had no such inhibitions on a soundstage, as Colman was about to play two roles that would make her the best-known actress in Britain.
She gained 2st 7lbs to play Queen Anne in Yorgos Lanthimos's The Favourite (2018), which chronicled the relationship between the first ruler of Great Britain and her cousinly courtiers, Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough (Rachel Weisz) and Abigail Hill, Baroness Masham (Emma Stone). As the darkly comic revisionist slice of British history landed the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival, Colman won the Volpi Cup for her display of bawdy eccentricity and pitiable vulnerability. She would add the Golden Globe and the BAFTA before claiming the Academy Award for Best Actress.
Her acceptance speeches became the stuff of legend. At the Globes, she said: 'Cor blimey, thank you so much. I'm not going to cry because my entire table will point and laugh at me as I've been crying all evening...I would like to tell you how much this film meant to me, but I can't think of it because I'm too excited.' She informed the BAFTA audience, 'We're having an amazing night. We're going to get so pi**ed later. Yorgos Lanthimos. I can't think of the words to thank you enough for letting me do this. My most favourite time ever. This isn't for the lead it's for A lead and as far as I'm concerned all three of us are the same and should be the lead and it's weird that we can't do that. It's got my name on it but we can scratch in some others. Thank you so much. I went on a private jet and I ate constantly through the film and it was brilliant and I promise I will keep on enjoying this, because it's amazing.'
However, it was the Oscar speech that made headlines and it's worth quoting in full: 'It's genuinely quite stressful. This is hilarious; got an Oscar. Okay. I have to thank lots of people. If, by the way, I forget anybody I'm gonna find you later and I'm gonna give you all a massive snog, and I'm really sorry if I might forget now. Yorgos, my best director, in the best film, and with Emily and Rachel, the two loveliest women in the world to fall in love with and to go to work with every day. I mean, you can imagine, it wasn't a hardship. And to be in this category with these extraordinary women. And Glenn Close, you've been my idol for so long and this is not how I wanted it to be. And I think you're amazing and I love you very much. I love you all. Thank you, Lindy King, my agent who took me on over 20 years ago. Thank you sooo much. And Olive, and Hildy, and Bryna, who made me do things that I've said no to but she was right. And my mum and my dad - well, you know. And my kids who are at home and watching, look! Well, if you're not then, well kind of well done, but I sort of hope you are. This is not gonna happen again. And any little girl who is practicing their speech on the telly, you never know. And when I used to work as a cleaner, and I loved that job, I did spend quite a lot of my time imagining this - oh, please wrap up. Right, okay. [Sticks out her tongue and blows a raspberry.] Thank you. And my husband Ed, my best friend, I love you so much. Twenty-five years and you've been my best supporter, and he's gonna cry. I'm not. And thank you so much. Fox, everybody, everybody, the cast, the crew. Frances, Sam, thank you. Thank you so much [blows a kiss], Lady Gaga. [Lady Gaga blows kisses back.] And Melissa. Thank you.'
And, in case you're thinking that Colman called Stone by the wrong name, it's her real name. However, as Equity already had an Emily Stone, she had to make a change. Despite Colman giving her the shock of her life by putting a wet sponge up her frock before a sex scene, Stone clearly fell under the Colman spell. 'She is kind of a perfect woman,' she opined. Weisz concurred by declaring, 'She's kind of heartbreaking - but also funny, swears like a trooper, irreverent, feminist, bold, and bawdy. She's a great big delicious cocktail of a person.'
Amidst all the accolades, it's possible to overlook Colman's fine turn as Madame Thénardier in the BBC's 2018 interpretation of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables and the fact that she had signed up to voice Lily in the 32nd season of The Simpsons (1989-). But there was no escaping the news that Colman had become the first actress in screen history to play both Queen Elizabeth and her daughter Elizabeth II, when she succeeded Claire Foy for the third and fourth seasons of The Crown (2016-23), Peter Morgan's monumental, if occasionally fanciful history of the House of Windsor. For her efforts, Colman won the Golden Globe for Best Actress - Television Series Drama and the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series. She was also recognised by the Screen Actors Guild in the category of Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Drama Series. Furthermore, she was part of the ensemble cast that won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series in both 2019 and 2020.
No wonder Meryl Streep told Harper's Bazaar, 'The fierceness, the sadness, the darkness and despair that emerge in her work seem to issue from some other source, and make her gorgeous talent, whether it draws from real or imagined pain.' She continued, 'I think she is one of our GREAT actresses, I felt so lucky to have worked with her; and I can't wait to see where that antic, brave imagination takes us with the Queen. Because it will be imagined, as there is no more private, and hence mysterious, personage than Queen Elizabeth. But I am sure Olivia will lead with her heart and be guided by her unerring intuition and intelligence - and draw as accurate an essence as can be divined.'
Peter Morgan also had nothing but praise: 'She can be delightfully benign and utterly grotesque at the same time. Her talent is somewhat like Mozart's in Amadeus - and the rest of us just watch like Salieri. She's never unprepared, and yet sometimes you find out she's just learned her lines in the loo five minutes before.' Yet Colman remained as self-deprecating as ever, despite having spent hours studying Her late Majesty on video and working with voice and movement coaches. 'I walk a bit like a farmer, not a queen,' Colman insisted, 'and I'm not a very good physical impersonator. So there is a dollop of artistic licence.' No one seemed to mind, however.
Working Mum and National Treasure
There was little danger of the accolades going to Colman's head or her taking her success for granted. She travelled to Ohio to join Jim Gaffigan in playing Zeke and Hope Slaughter, two members of a Pentecostal community in Appalachia, in Britt Poulton and Dan Madison Savage's debut feature, Them That Follow (2019). But she didn't enjoy being away from her family for the two-week shoot. Then, having narrated the documentary series, Becoming You, she earned an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her work as middle-aged daughter Anne nursing Anthony (Anthony Hopkins) through dementia in Florian Zeller's The Father (both 2020). Hopkins won his second Academy Award after his indelible display as Hannibal Lecter in Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs (1991), but Colman was every bit as impressive.
Notwithstanding the Coronavirus pandemic, a busy 2021 saw her voice PAL in Mike Rianda and Jeff Rowe's The Mitchells vs the Machines and Donka Pudowski in Sarah Smith and Jean-Philippe Vine's Ron's Gone Wrong, while she also narrated Will Sharpe's The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, which starred Benedict Cumberbatch and Claire Foy. Sharpe again directed when Colman was paired with David Thewlis as parent killers Susan and Christopher Edwards in Landscapers, which had been scripted by husband, Ed Sinclair. While she was immensely proud of this achievement, it was surpassed by the accumulation of Golden Globe, Oscar, and Screen Actors Guild nominations for Best Actress for her performance as Leda Caruso, an academic who befriends single mother Nina (Dakota Johnson) on a Greek holiday and confides the trouble she had experienced as a younger woman (Jessie Buckley) with her own children in Maggie Gyllenhaal's adaptation of Elena Ferrante's novel, The Lost Daughter.
As if the year wasn't exhausting enough on an acting level, Colman and Sinclair also moved the family to a Grade II-listed barn near Sandringham in Norfolk because life on the Peckham/Camberwell border had simply become too hectic. 'I hate the loss of anonymity,' she confided to the press. 'No one teaches you how to deal with that. I now just tend to stay home because it's so weird not to be on an equal footing with people. They know your face, and you don't know them. It's not that people aren't lovely, but it's harder to deal with than you imagine.' With dogs Alfred, Lord Waggyson and Pockets also making the trip, the Sinclairs quickly took to country life. But the irresistible offers of work kept coming.
She had been cast alongside Colin Firth as the well-heeled Nivens in Eva Husson's Mothering Sunday (2021), in which 1920s housemaid Jane Fairchild (Odessa Young) takes advantage of a family outing to meet her illicit lover. Now, Colman took to the road as Joy, a troubled new mother learning a few life lessons from 12 year-old Irish runaway, Mully (Charlie Reid), in Emer Reynolds's coming-of-age comedy, Joyride. Remaining in rite-of-passage territory, Colman appeared as Sarah Nelson, the mother of the bisexual Nick (Kit O'Connor), in the Netflix saga, Heartsopper, which earned her the inaugural Children's and Family Emmy for Outstanding Guest Performance.
Also in 2022, she voiced the Ghost of Christmas Past in Stephen Donnelly's Scrooge: A Christmas Carol and Mama Bear alongside Antonio Banderas in Joel Crawford's Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. Colman also worked with director Sam Mendes (who described her as 'a Ferrari dressed like a Mini') in Empire of Light, with her performance as seaside cinema manager Hilary Small earning her another Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in a Motion Picture - Drama.
Although she had cameo'd alongside Michael Sheen and David Tennant in the Covid comedy, Staged (2022), her scene as herself was cut from Greta Gerwig's Barbie. But Colman was on riotous form in 1920s Littlehampton, as devout Christian Edith Swan accuses Irish single mother neigbour, Rose Gooding (Jessie Buckley), of sending poison pen missives in Thea Sharrock's's reimagining of a true story in Wicked Little Letters, which Colman also co-produced. She was also outstanding as Miss Haversham in writer Steven Knight's take on Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, which she followed with another TV excursion, as she entered the Marvel Cinematic Universe as MI6 agent, Sonya Falsworth, in five episodes of Disney's Secret Invasion (all 2023), opposite Samuel L. Jackson.
Adopting an outrageous Cockney accent, Colman stole scenes from Timothée Chalamet, as laundress Mrs Scrubbit in Paul King's Wonka, a musical origins story that imagines how Willy Wonka became a fabled chocolatier. Continuing the food theme, she appeared as Andrea Terry alongside Jeremy Allen White as Chicago chef Carmy Berzatto in three episodes of The Bear (2022-). The ursine star was considerably more polite in Dougal Wilson's Paddington in Peru (2024), in which the Browns head to South America to find Aunt Lucy, who has gone missing from the Home for Retired Bears run by Mother Superior (Colman).
Having relished every second of the contrast between the genial nun and the avaricious Clarissa Cabot, Colman bade farewell to Elizabeth II in a final episode of The Crown before rejoining forces with a couple of familiar faces, as Lady Agatha in the Channel 4 sketch show, Mitchell and Webb Are Not Helping. She will soon be seen as Hannah alongside John Lithgow in Sophie Hyde's Australian saga, Jimpa, and as Mrs Bennet opposite Emma Corrin's Elizabeth and Jack Lowden's Darcy in a new TV adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.
For now, though, audiences will have to squirm at the humiliations that Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch inflict upon each other, as feuding marrieds Ivy and Theo in Jay Roach's The Roses, a loose remake of Danny DeVito's black comedy classic, The War of the Roses (1989), which had pitched Michael Douglas against Kathleen Turner. She has dropped hints that she would love to be M in the next Bond movie and we at Cinema Paradiso are fully onboard.
But Colman is happy to accept whatever comes along. After all, she's not done too badly so far. As she told Forbes magazine: 'I think I have been very lucky that people have sent me good scripts, but it's always sort of a gut feeling. Sometimes, it's whether it will fit in with something that's already been booked. It might mean they have to go in a certain period and I can't do it, so I can't do that job and that's a shame, and I watch it and go, "Oh bums, I wish I could've done it." Sometimes, it's "When are they doing it? Ooh, great! Oh no, I would love to play that part, so I'm really pleased." Sometimes, it's a quite small time commitment and I do need the money because I've done a project for love for the last six months, so there's no plan, but you never know what's coming.' We rather suspect that whatever appears on the horizon, Colman will excel, even if she plays a despised fisherwoman who seeks some comfort from the teasing of her neighbours in a husband made out of wicker!
