Frances de la Tour Biography

Frances de la Tour trained at the Drama Centre in London in the 1960s before joining the Royal Shakespeare Company. Through 1971, her work there included the roles of Hoyden in The Relapse and Helena in Peter Brook's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. For the National Theatre, her credits include Brighton Beach Memoirs, Les Parents Terribles, the title role in St Joan and The Good Hope. She received a Variety Club Best Actress Award for Noel Coward's Fallen Angels.

Frances won a Tony Award for her performance as Mrs. Lintott in the multi award-winning play The History Boys, and was also nominated for a BAFTA in the 2006 screen version of the stage play. She has earned three Olivier Awards: in 1980 for Best Actress in Duet for One, for which she also won the Evening Standard Best Actress Award; in 1984 for Best Actress in a Revival for A Moon for the Misbegotten; and in 1992 for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for When She Danced.

Early television appearances include the 1970s sitcom Rising Damp, Duet for One, for which she received a BAFTA Best Actress nomination, the BBC's Waking the Dead, Poirot: Death on the Nile, Miss Marple: The Moving Finger, BBC's Sensitive Skin and the CBS-TV series 3 lbs.

Her filmography includes the comedy Rising Damp, based on the popular television series, for which she won the Evening Standard's Best Actress Award. She appeared as Madame Olympe Maxime in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005) and also played opposite Denzel Washington and Gary Oldman in The Book of Eli (2010). She joined an all-star cast, including Johnny Depp and Anne Hathaway, in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland (2010), in the role of Aunt Imogene, reprising her role in the sequel, Alice Through the Looking Glass (2016).

Frances went on to play Madame Emilie in Martin Scorcese's fantasy film Hugo (2011) and from 2013 to 2014, she played the role of Ms. Baron, the alcoholic "no nonsense" headteacher on the BBC One drama series Big School. Other recurring and regular TV roles include Mother Hildegarde on the popular historical drama series Outlander in 2016, Violet Crosby on the ITV/PBS series Vicious from 2013 to 2016, Yvette Sabine on Amazon Prime Video's The Collection in 2016 and Lady Matilda Crawley on the ITV mini-series Vanity Fair in 2018.

Most recently, she played The Dowager in the Netflix original film, Enola Holmes (2020), starring Millie Bobby Brown in the title role.