Janet McTeer Biography

Janet McTeer is a Tony-winning English actress whose few appearances on the big screen have earned her two Oscar nominations, one for her lead role as a single mom in Tumbleweeds (1999) and one for her supporting role as a woman who lives as a man in Albert Nobbs (2012). Her early career was on the stage and in British television, getting raves for her statuesque physicality (she’s over six feet tall) and a natural aristocratic bearing. Her first big break came with the 1990 TV production of Portrait of a Marriage, playing Vita Sackville-West, writer and lover of Virginia Woolf. McTeer then appeared in several BBC dramas during the 1990s, including Wuthering Heights (1992) and the series The Governor (1995-96). She was a hit as Nora in the play A Doll’s House, first in London in 1996 and then on Broadway, where she won a Tony Award for the 1997 production, a role that led to her being cast in the independent film Tumbleweeds (she lost the Oscar that year to Hilary Swank in Boys Don’t Cry). McTeer went on to appear in Waking the Dead (2000, starring Billy Crudup) and As You Like It (2006, directed by Kenneth Branagh), but had more success in television, in the mini-series Sense & Sensibility (2008) and the movie Into the Storm (2009, as Winston Churchill‘s wife, Clementine). Named an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2008, she received a second Oscar nomination for her role opposite Glenn Close in Albert Nobbs (2011), then co-starred in Close’s television series Damages (2012).