Janet McTeer

Janet McTeer (born May 8, 1961, Newcastle upon Tyne, England) is a British actress who garnered acclaim for her work in theater, television, and film. McTeer won a Tony Award and an Olivier Award for her performance as Nora in A Doll’s House (1996–97), and she received Oscar nominations for her roles in the films Tumbleweeds (1999) and Albert Nobbs (2011).

Stage career

At age 17 McTeer entered the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. In 1984 she made her stage debut at the Nottingham Playhouse in Mother Courage and Her Children. With a commanding presence (she stood 6 feet 1 inch [1.85 meters]), McTeer began to work steadily in the theater. Among her stage credits were roles in plays by William Shakespeare and Anton Chekhov and performances with the Royal Shakespeare Company, Queen’s Theatre, Manchester Royal Exchange, and the Royal National Theatre. McTeer starred as Mary in Timberlake Wertenbaker’s The Grace of Mary Traverse (1985) and as Yelena in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya (1992); both performances earned her Laurence Olivier Award nominations.

In 1996 McTeer appeared as the childlike Nora in a revival of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House at the Playhouse Theatre in London. Critics hailed her performance as “perfect,” and she received an Evening Standard and an Olivier award. In 1997 she reprised the role in her Broadway debut. McTeer continued to earn accolades, winning a Tony Award for best actress. She later appeared in West End productions of Mary Stuart (2005–06) and Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage (2008). Both subsequently moved to Broadway, and she reprised her role in the former in 2009 and in the latter the following year.

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McTeer captured the hauteur and venom of La Marquise de Merteuil in a Donmar Warehouse production (2015) of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. The production was broadcast in cinemas as part of the National Theatre Live initiative. In 2018 she starred in the Broadway play Bernhardt/Hamlet, portraying legendary actress Sarah Bernhardt as she becomes the first woman to perform as Shakespeare’s Hamlet in 1899.

TV work

In addition to the stage, McTeer appeared on television and in movies. On American television she was featured in such Masterpiece Theater productions as Precious Bane (1989), 102 Boulevard Haussman (1990), and Portrait of a Marriage (1990), in which she starred as novelist Vita Sackville-West. McTeer’s British TV performances included roles in the miniseries The Governor (1996) and such made-for-TV films as A Masculine Ending (1992) and Dead Romantic (1993).

After appearing in a television miniseries (2008) based on Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, McTeer played the wife of Winston Churchill in the TV movie Into the Storm (2009) and the mother of socialite Sylvia Tietjens in the miniseries adaptation (2012) of Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End. McTeer portrayed the steely Jacquetta Woodville, mother of Elizabeth Woodville, in the miniseries The White Queen (2013) and won particular praise for her flinty turn as the head of MI6 in the spy thriller miniseries The Honorable Woman (2014). In 2018 she joined the cast of the TV series Jessica Jones, Ozark, and Sorry for Your Loss. McTeer later portrayed Hera in KAOS (2024– ), a comedy series in which ancient Greek gods and goddesses rule the modern world.

Films

McTeer received Academy Award nominations for her roles in Tumbleweeds (1999), as a vagabond single mother, and Albert Nobbs (2011), as a woman who disguises herself as a man in 19th-century Ireland. She appeared in a number of other motion pictures, including the thriller Half Moon Street (1986); Carrington (1995), in which she played the English artist Vanessa Bell; As You Like It (2005), Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s play; the horror movie The Woman in Black (2012); and Hannah Arendt (2012), in which she was cast as the American writer Mary McCarthy, a close friend to Arendt.

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McTeer later narrated the Disney live-action feature Maleficent (2014), about the villain from Sleeping Beauty (Angelina Jolie), and appeared as Edith Prior, an ancestor of the protagonist, in the dystopian films Insurgent (2015) and Allegiant (2016), adapted from the young adult novels by Veronica Roth. In 2016 she evinced the worries of a mother whose son has been paralyzed in Me Before You. McTeer’s later films include The Menu (2022), a satirical thriller set in an exclusive restaurant.