Age: 43
female
Victoria Natalie Yeates (born 19 April 1983) is an English actress. She is best known for her role as Sister Winifred in the period drama series Call the Midwife. She also appeared in the film Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald and its sequel Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore. Yeates was born and raised in Bournemouth, Dorset and practised ballet dancing as a child. In 2006, she earned a degree in acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA). She began her career on the stage, earning critical praise for her roles in Noël Coward's Private Lives, in the Rookery Nook and in Michael McClure's The Beard. In 2017, she began touring in a production of Arthur Miller's The Crucible. In 2014, she joined the cast of the BBC period drama Call the Midwife as Sister Winifred, a midwife who moves to Poplar, London in the late 1950s to work at Nonnatus House. She became engaged to musician Paul Housden in 2016 in South Africa, during filming for the Call the Midwife Christmas special. They reside in London and married in June 2018.
Michael Cooney’s riotous farce has all the ingredients for rib-tickling hilarity and offers a colorful selection of character roles. The hero, Eric Swan, has been laid off and never found the courage to tell his wife. Instead, he has invented a whole string of fictitious claimants living as lodgers at his home, and each week he cashes their benefit checks. Unfortunately, a man from the DSS arrives on the very morning that Swan, realizing the scam is getting out of hand, has announced that one of his lodgers has died. A grief counsellor arrives, hotly pursued by a marriage-relations expert and an undertaker. As a result, Swan and his reluctant collaborator, Norman McDonald, have to invent a whole repertory company of fake identities and fictitious family relationships, and there are delirious passages when everyone on stage seems to be talking at cross-purposes. The panicky mayhem kicks in early and never lets up, and the ludicrous plot is developed with an insane logic that touches on the inspirational. And while the play’s subject matter is topical, the farce is as reassuringly familiar. Huge-chested old boots are groped in the mistaken impression that they are chaps in drag, dead bodies that aren’t really dead are subjected to terrible indignities and Michael Cooney seems touchingly convinced that he is the first writer ever to have considered the comic possibilities of the word “Uranus”.
