Michelle Dockery biography

Synopsis

Early Years

Michelle Dockery was born on December 15, 1981, in Romford, East London, England, the youngest of three girls. She was raised in Romford and educated at the Chadwell Heath Foundation School before training at the Finch Stage School and the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. As a child, she would go to auditions, at one point trying out for The Sound of Music (but she was apparently overlooked because of her cockney accent).

After graduating from Guildhall in 2004, Dockery joined the National Youth Theatre and made her professional debut in His Dark Materials at the Royal National Theatre. She made her television debut the following year as Betty in Fingersmith, a two-part BBC miniseries. In 2006, Dockery was nominated for the Ian Charleson Award for her performance in Pillars of the Community, again at the Royal National Theatre.

During this period, Dockery kept herself and the critics busy, appearing in Burnt by the Sun at the National Theatre (and earning an Olivier Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress), Pygmalion (for which she won second prize at the Ian Charleson Awards) and Bath, on a U.K. tour and at the Old Vic (for which she was nominated for Best Newcomer at the 2008 Evening Standard Awards).

A Career on a Roll

With a solid amount of theater success under her belt, Dockery began popping up regularly in TV movies, such as Hogfather (2006), Consent (2007) and Poppy Shakespeare (2008), and in TV series such as Heartbeat (2008) and Waking the Dead (2009). Her big break came in the fall of 2010, with the principal role of the snooty Lady Mary Crawley in the BBC series Downton Abbey.

The show was an instant hit and became an international smash, propelling Dockery into the spotlight. For the series' first season, she was nominated for a Southbank Award for Best Breakthrough Performance in a TV drama. In 2012 she received an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series and a Screen Actors Guild nomination for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Drama Series. That same year, she and the cast won the SAG Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series, and 2013 brought her a Golden Globe nomination for Best Performance by an Actress in a Television Series, Drama.

Her TV success has allowed her to begin the transition into big-screen feature films, with roles in the assassin thriller Hanna (2011) and the 2012 adaptation of Anna Karenina. She is also a featured player in the 2013 thriller Non-Stop, starring Liam Neeson and Julianne Moore.