Lindsay Duncan is a Tony Award-winning actress, who was born on 7 November 1950 in Edinburgh, Scotland. She is married to a fellow Scottish actor Hilton McRae and they have a son, Cal McRae, who was born in September 1991.
Lindsay Duncan began her career in acting after finishing her studies at Central School of Speech and Drama in London. After playing minor roles, her talent was spotted and she soon began appearing in renowned London stage and screen productions. Her first notable performance was in Pierre Cholderlos de Laclos’ Les Liaisons Dangereuses, produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford in London and New York. Lindsay Duncan was nominated for the 1987 Tony awards in the Best Actress category for her role of La Marquise de Merteuil. In 1998, her performance in Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof brought her the London Evening Standard Best Actress award. Lindsay Duncan also won the Olivier Award for the Best Actress in 1987 owing to her performance in Noël Coward's Private Lives.
Lindsay Duncan made her entry into television in the 1980s and had acted in several popular productions including, On Approval, Reilly, Ace of Spies, Dead Head, Traffik, G.B.H., A Year in Provence and Shooting the Past. Along her career path, she developed a penchant for adaptations of literary classics and worked in the 1997 television series A History of Tom Jones: A Foundling as Lady Ballaston and the 1999 television miniseries Oliver Twist as Elizabeth Leeford. She also starred in the much-acclaimed British television drama Perfect Strangers, a HBO-BBC series Rome, the award-winning television film Longford and Criminal Justice.
Besides theatre and television, Lindsay Duncan is also known for her roles in several films. At the 1990 "Sitges" Catalonian International Film Festival, Lindsay Duncan won the Best Actress award for her performance in The Reflecting Skin, a surreal film about a young boy growing up in rural Idaho in the 1950s. She starred as Hippolyta and Titania in the film adaptation of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1996. In 1999, Lindsay Duncan appeared in dual roles as the heroine's mother and drug-addicted aunt in the screen adaptation of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park. In the same year, she also acted in An Ideal Husband, a movie based on the play by Oscar Wilde.
Lindsay Duncan won the Audience Award at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 2003 for her stunning performance in AfterLife. Her other notable films include, Under the Tuscan Sun, a film based on the memoir of Frances Mayes, which was released in 2003 and Starter for 10, in which she played Rose Harbinson and the film was released in 2006.
On 9 April 2008, it was announced that Lindsay Duncan will portray Margaret Thatcher in the BBC film Thatcher about the former British Prime Minister's last year in office.
