Simply Anna • Anna Maxwell Martin Fansite •

She was Lyra in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials at the National, she has shared the stage with Eileen Atkins (in Honour and The Female of the Species), played Isabella in Measure for Measure, Regan in King Lear and Sally Bowles in Cabaret. She has worn bonnets in Bleak House and North and South, a corset as Elizabeth Darcy in PD James's Death Comes to Pemberley (pictured below) and a prison officer’s uniform in Accused, a gritty Jimmy McGovern story on television. An enviably versatile actress, Anna Maxwell Martin has won two BAFTAs (for Esther Summerson in Bleak House and N in Poppy Shakespeare) and been nominated for an Olivier (for Lyra).  Maxwell Martin has scarcely been out of work since her first job after graduation, in The Little Foxes at the Donmar. Now she is back at the National Theatre, in Consent, a new play by Nina Raine, directed by her husband Roger Michell, who previously directed Raine’s lauded Tribes at the Royal Court. Maxwell Martin’s character, Kitty, i...

Anna Maxwell Martin , the steely star of the BBC adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, is to take up the daggers as Lady Macbeth when she makes her debut at the Young Vic in a radical new production, opposite her stage husband John Heffernan . Macbeth, which will open at London’s  Young Vic  in November and then transfer to the partner theatres,  Birmingham Rep  and  Home  in Manchester, will feature a company of actors and dancers. It is being jointly created by director Carrie Cracknell and choreographer Lucy Guerin, who brought an acclaimed  Medea  to the  National Theatre  last year. Heffernan, also appearing for the first time at the  Young Vic , recently starred in the RSC Oppenheimer, and in the BBC’s gothic fantasy adaptation of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, and as Edward II at the National Theatre. Maxwell Martin, who won early critical acclaim with a six-hour performance as Lyra in the National Theatre’s sell-ou...

HE IS television's hottest hunk and now a second Beverley actress is to star alongside him. Aidan Turner set pulses racing as the star of BBC hit series Poldark, when he appeared alongside Eleanor Tomlinson, also from Beverley. Now, Turner is to head the cast in another major BBC One series, this time starring another Beverley actress – double Bafta award-winner Anna Maxwell Martin. Maxwell Martin and Turner are in a stellar cast lined up for a BBC One adaptation of the Agatha Christie thriller And Then There Were None, due to be broadcast over Christmas. The adaptation of the bestselling crime novel features stars including Miranda Richardson, Charles Dance and Sam Neill and is expected to be another BBC hit. Retired Beverley High School teacher Helen Gallifant remembers Beverley actres- ses Anna and Eleanor from their days at the girls' secondary in the town. She said: "I'm sure a lot of people in Beverley will be following both Anna and Eleanor's careers. ...

Wave goodbye to Downton Abbey, say hello to Anna Maxwell-Martin as a country vicar with a sideline in exorcisms in ITV’s new supernatural drama. Midwinter of the Spirit, commissioned for the ITV Encore drama channel, stars the Bafta-winning Maxwell-Martin as vicar Merrily Watkins, a single mother whose newly acquired training has put her on “the dark side of the pulpit.” ITV said: “She’s become one of the few women priests working as an exorcist - a job increasingly mistrusted by the modern Church and rarely talked about, even though it operates in virtually every diocese in the UK.” David Threlfall plays Rev Huw Owen, a deliverance ministry tutor and Merrily’s mentor. Based on Phil Rickman’s novels, the screenwriter is Stephen Volk whose banned BBC play Ghostwatch was recently voted by viewers one of the scariest TV moments of all time. ITV hopes the initial 3-part serial, set in motion when a man is found murdered in the most horrific circumstances imaginable and Merrily beco...

BEVERLEY-born actress Anna Maxwell Martin is in the running for her third Bafta for her role in period drama South Riding. The ex-Beverley High School pupil is a contender in the leading actress category of the British Academy of Film and Television Awards. She was nominated for her role as the inspirational head teacher of a girls' school in the BBC's adaptation of South Riding. The period drama, which was filmed across the region, was based on the novel by East Yorkshire author Winifred Holtby. Anna, 32, has already won two Baftas for previous roles. Her latest nomination has delighted former teachers who remember the actress from her schooldays at the girls' secondary in Norwood, where she was a pupil from 1988-95. Former deputy head Angela Martinson said Anna's former teachers and school friends will be proud of her success. Mrs Martinson said: "I just felt so proud of her when I saw her in South Riding. I just think she's ...

The Guardian Published: 16th Feb 2011 Author: Emine Saner Source As a drama student, Anna Maxwell Martin used to go for walks along the Thames. "I would see the National theatre," she recalls, "and think, 'I'm going to be there one day.'" Two years later, in 2003, she was – playing Lyra in His Dark Materials, and bagging an Olivier nomination in the process. Such single-mindedness seems at odds with the slight person sitting before me in a London bar, finishing her stories with great squeals. Like the one about her mother inviting all her friends round after Maxwell Martin won her first Bafta in 2006, for playing orphan Esther Summerson in the BBC's star-studded Bleak House; the guests were invited, she says, "just to look at it!" Other times, she's thoughtful, delivering considered answers with a faint Yorkshire accent. Though a self-confessed "show-off", she is modest about her work: "I'm starting to t...

 SOURCE Anna Maxwell Martin plays Sarah Burton, a modern career woman who returns home to take up the headmistress-ship of a struggling Yorkshire high school for girls. Full of ambition, passion and fire to take her life into her own hands, Sarah falls for the man least likely to have won her heart, in Andrew Davies's new three-part drama serial South Riding for BBC One. "Sarah Burton is a teacher who was born and brought up in South Riding, which is technically East Yorkshire," says Anna Maxwell Martin. "She left to go to work in London and she returns to be a Headmistress of a local girls' school. "She is a very opinionated woman. I suppose she is verging on being a feminist, quite left-wing and very progressive and she has big plans for the girls of the South Riding. "When Sarah returns to the South Riding and is offered the post of Headmistress, she sort of goes in guns bl...

I thought I'll gather together all reviews for the play which mention Anna's part as Isabella.  (To see the full reviews you can click on the bold links) The Stage wrote  In the hands of the compellingly mercurial Anna Maxwell Martin - in her first major Shakespeare role - Isabella’s passionate, erotically charged arguments and outbursts of anger are punctuated with quiet moments of girlish nervousness. Gradually Maxwell Martin develops poise for Isabella, culminating in the withering gaze of incredulity with which she answers Vincentio’s clumsy proposal in Shakespeare’s rather tortuous denouement.

The Metro Published: February 18, 2010 Author: Keith Watson Source I’ve got a face made for suffering,’ sighs Anna Maxwell Martin before letting out a peal of laughter that punctuates her lively conversation. I don’t get offered many comedies. She’s about as far from the stoical Esther Summerson of Bleak House fame as you could imagine. Martin won a Best Actress Bafta for Esther back in 2005 and followed it up two years ago with another for Poppy Shakespeare, in which she played N, a young woman trapped inside the madness of the mental health system. Add to that a struggling single mother in White Girl and a debt-ridden wife in Freefall, and it would seem that misery is Ms Martin’s forte. But there’s much more to her than that. For one thing, she can dance, as she shows in On Expenses, a TV film that satirically lifts the lid on the financial skulduggery of MPs in Westminster. It’s the story of Heather Brooke, the investigative journalist whose digging bro...

The Times Published: February 10, 2010 Author: Lucy Powell  Source   Anna Maxwell Martin strides into the office of the Almeida Theatre and stops short, her expressive face momentarily frozen. “Ahhhhh!” she exclaims, one long, comically plaintive note. “I’m going to have a nervous breakdown in this interview. How embarrassing.” She’s staring at the Almeida’s array of theatre awards, which decorate every available inch of wall in the office. But the 31-year-old actress, fizzing with energy, lollipop thin in her black and white stripy top and outsize baggy jeans, has little reason to be daunted. While still at Lamda she was cast in a renowned production of The Little Foxes at the Donmar. Then she spearheaded Nicholas Hytner’s brave new National, playing the 12-year-old Lyra in a landmark 2004 production of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials . But to most, Maxwell Martin remains Esther Summerson, the sad, secretive soul at the heart of the BBC’s lavish series ...

The Observer Published: 21 February 2010 Author: Imogen Carter Source  Best known for her Bafta-winning role in BBC1's Bleak House , 31-year-old Anna Maxwell Martin is playing Isabella opposite Rory Kinnear in Measure for Measure at the Almeida, London (until 10 April). Following the birth of her first child, she returns to our screens on Tuesday in the BBC4 drama On Expenses , in which she stars as journalist and campaigner Heather Brooke, who fought for years to expose the MPs' expenses scandal.   Tell me about Measure for Measure It's a very sexy play given a modern staging. We've created a dark, sinister world where vice has run rampant. The Duke's method for improving things is to disappear and come back in disguise. Gordon Brown could take some tips from that. Do you think it's still relevant today? Absolutely. It's about ego and corruption of power. And sex, which is a huge theme in the play, is everywhere in mode...

The Independent Published: 15 November 2009 Author: Rhiannon Harries Source

Whats On Stage Published: 14 July 2008 Author: Terri Paddock Source   In 2003, actress Anna Maxwell Martin co-starred with Eileen Aktins in the UK premiere of Australian Joanna Murray-Smith’s play Honour , directed by Roger Michell. This week, she opens in the UK premiere of Murray-Smith’s The Female of the Species , once again starring Atkins and directed by her now-partner Michell. In the intervening years, Maxwell Martin has racked up credits including His Dark Materials, Three Sisters and Cabaret on stage, and Bleak House, Becoming Jane, Poppy Shakespeare and Enduring Love on screen. I was totally thrilled when I got the job on Honour . I was really young, not long out of drama school. It was the second play I did at the National, after The Coast of Utopia . I wanted it so badly. I was desperate for it. It was like working with acting royalty. I responded to the play at that particular time and at that age. I was in my early twenties. I hadn’t personally but a lot o...

The Daily Mail Website Published: 24 February 2007 Author: Stuart Husband Source Anna Maxwell Martin has a winning line in self-deprecation. Take her appearance: 'I've been told I have an 'interesting' face,' she says, 'meaning it has this rounded shape, with tiny eyes and no cheekbones.' Take her life: ?I lead the dullest existence.' Take, even, her name. 'Oh, it was a hideous mistake,' she cringes. 'There was already an Anna Martin in Equity, so I added my granddad's name, and it makes me sound like I'm trying to be an aristocrat. And people sometimes hyphenate it, which is even worse.' The one thing that even Anna can't denigrate is her ability as an actress. She's only been working for five years, but she's already been nominated for an Olivier Award for her performance as Philip Pullman's heroine Lyra in the mammoth National Theatre production of His Dark Materials , and s...

Bafta Website Published: 8th June 09 Author: Matthew Bell Source A nna Maxwell Martin, versatile star of Poppy Shakespeare and White Girl, talks to Matthew Bell about her “challenging” roles and double BAFTA win. For most actresses, winning a bafta is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Yet Anna Maxwell Martin has bagged two by the age of 30: her first for Bleak House in 2006 and now for Poppy Shakespeare. Having recently given birth to her daughter and with her partner, film director Roger Michell, working in New York, Maxwell Martin was unable to attend the Television Awards ceremony in April. “It’s really full on. She is my first and it’s a huge shock to the system, but I wish I could have been there now for obvious reasons,” she says. In fact, Maxwell Martin was asleep while the masks were being handed out: “I heard this crashing and banging and my step kids ran into the room telling me to get up,” she recalls. “I couldn’t believe it; I sat there in shock.” Maxwell Martin has always w...