Age: 44
female
Michelle Suzanne Dockery (born 15 December 1981) is an English actress. She is best known for starring as Lady Mary Crawley in the ITV television period drama series Downton Abbey (2010–2015), for which she was nominated for a Golden Globe Award and three consecutive Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series. She reprised her role in the films Downton Abbey (2019) and Downton Abbey: A New Era (2022). After graduating from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Dockery made her professional stage debut in His Dark Materials in 2004. For her role as Eliza Doolittle in a 2007 London revival of Pygmalion, she was nominated for the Evening Standard Award. For her role in the 2009 play Burnt by the Sun, she earned an Olivier Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Dockery has appeared in the films Hanna (2011), Anna Karenina (2012), Non-Stop (2014), and The Gentlemen (2019). She has also played lead roles in the western miniseries Godless (2017), for which she received her fourth Emmy nomination, and the drama miniseries Defending Jacob (2020) and Anatomy of a Scandal (2022). She attended the Finch Stage School, and graduated from the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in 2004
Washington, DC, 1950. Everyone keeps to themselves at Briarwood House, a down-at-the-heels all-female boardinghouse in the heart of the nation’s capital where secrets hide behind white picket fences. But when the lovely, mysterious widow Grace March moves into the attic room, she draws her oddball collection of neighbors into unlikely friendship: poised English beauty Fliss, whose facade of perfect wife and mother covers gaping inner wounds; policeman’s daughter Nora, who finds herself entangled with a shadowy gangster; frustrated baseball star Beatrice, whose career has come to an end along with the women’s baseball league of WWII; and poisonous, gung-ho Arlene, who has thrown herself into McCarthy’s Red Scare. Grace’s weekly attic-room dinner parties and window-brewed sun tea become a healing balm on all their lives, but she hides a terrible secret of her own. When a shocking act of violence tears the house apart, the Briar Club women must decide once and for all: who is the true enemy in their midst? Capturing the paranoia of the McCarthy era and evoking the changing roles for women in postwar America, The Briar Club is an intimate and thrilling novel of secrets and loyalty put to the test.
