Claire Foy

Claire Foy (born 16 April 1984) is an English actress. She studied drama and screen studies at Liverpool John Moores University and trained at the Oxford School of Drama, where she appeared in four plays, including Watership Down. She made her screen debut in the pilot episode of Being Human (2008) and in an episode of the BBC soap opera Doctors (2008). Following her professional stage debut at the Royal National Theatre, she played the title role in the BBC One production of Little Dorrit, (2008), and made her film debut as Anna in Season of the Witch (2011).
She had main roles as Erin Matthews in the Channel 4 series The Promise(2011) and several other television films and miniseries, including as Kate Balfour in the NBC series Crossbones (2014). She received unanimous praise for her performance as Anne Boleyn in BBC2's Wolf Hall (2015), for which she was nominated for the British Academy Television Award for Best Actress and the Critics' Choice Television Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Movie/Miniseries. Since 2016, she has portrayed the young Queen Elizabeth II on the Netflix series The Crown, a role for which she has garnered critical acclaim and won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress - Television Series Drama and the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Drama Series.

Personal life

Foy was born at Stepping Hill Hospital in Stockport, the daughter of Caroline, who works for a pharmaceutical company, and David Foy, a sales consultant. She has said that her mother comes from "a massive Irish family." She grew up in Manchester and Leeds, the youngest of three children. Her family later moved to Longwick, Buckinghamshire for her father's job as a salesman for Rank Xerox. Her parents divorced when she was aged eight. She attended Aylesbury High School, a girls' grammar school, from the age of twelve; she then attended Liverpool John Moores University, studying drama and screen studies. She also trained in a one-year course at the Oxford School of Drama. She graduated in 2007 and moved to Peckham to share a house "with five friends from drama school".

She is married to actor Stephen Campbell Moore. Together they have one child, a daughter born in March 2015.

Career

While at the Oxford School of Drama, Foy appeared in the plays Top Girls, Watership Down, Easy Virtue and Touched. After appearing on television, she made her professional stage debut in DNA and The Miracle, two of a trio of one acts directed by Paul Miller at the Royal National Theatre in London; the other one act was Baby Girl. She starred as the main protagonist Amy Dorrit in BBC mini-series Little Dorrit, and was nominated for an RTS Award. She went on to appear in TV film Going Postal and in the Medieval adventure film Season of the Witch alongside Nicolas Cage. She also starred in the BBC revival of Upstairs Downstairs as Lady Persephone. Foy co-starred in the Channel 4 mini-series The Promise, broadcast in February 2011, which she described in an interview at the time as her "favourite job ever". She played a lead role of Helen in the TV movie The Night Watch, which was based on a Sarah Waters novel. She returned to the stage in February 2013 as Lady Macbeth, alongside James McAvoy in the title role, in Macbeth at the Trafalgar Studios.

In 2015, she played Queen Anne Boleyn in the six-part drama series, Wolf Hall. Starring opposite Mark Rylance and Damian Lewis, Foy's performance of the doomed Queen was met with unanimous praise, with some critics comparing her to Geneviève Bujold's iconic performance in Anne of the Thousand Days. The Guardian called her portrayal of Anne "chilling, poised and perfectly complex". Foy would go on to be nominated for the 2016 British Academy Television Award for Best Actress.

Filmography

Film

Television