Victoria Hamilton is a familiar face on our screens, having portrayed the Queen Mother in the major Netflix drama The Crown and Suranne Jones's neighbour in Doctor Foster.
She's currently starring in the third season of the hit Channel 5 drama The Teacher as Helen Simpson, a drama teacher whose comments about a non-binary student create conflict within the classroom.
Here's everything you need to know about the actress behind the characters.
Who is Victoria Hamilton married to?
In 2008, Victoria Hamilton married her husband, Mark Bazeley, who's also an actor. He has appeared in The Queen, The Bourne Ultimatum, Broadchurch and COBRA (which Victoria has a lead role in). The pair met in 2008 while co-starring production of Tennessee Williams's Suddenly Last Summer.
They have two sons called Hal and Tam.
“The only problem is when I get tired, I call them Ham and Tal. That’ll teach me to name them while I was still on morphine!", she joked in an Interview with The Independent.
“I was lucky that I met the man I wanted to marry and have children with at exactly the right time. I’d had lots of career already. And it’s just a very solid thing in your life. If work goes great, it’s fantastic. And if it doesn’t, you’ve got your family. I’m hugely lucky. Do I sound really smug?"
How old is Victoria Hamilton?
Victoria Hamilton is an actress who was born on the 5th April 1971, making her 54 years old.
She enjoys a healthy lifestyle of Pilates sessions and healthy eating, including making smoothies in her beloved Nutribullet.
In 2015, she told the Independent “It’s maintenance at my age. And I do love it. If I’m feeling particularly energetic, I’ll go for a run, and I’m quite interested in the Paleo Diet at the moment. Oh, I’m sounding like one of those actresses again, aren’t I? But actually, it’s about balance. If you become so pure that you can’t have a cake or a big night out, what’s the point?”
However, she's not obsessing too much about her age. “I know very beautiful actresses who say that at the age of 30, they start looking in the mirror and panicking.", she said.
“Of course, there are days when you look in the mirror and think, ‘Oh, dear God! Give me back the last 10 years!’ And nothing ages you like having kids – it’s the sleep deprivation. But everything’s held together relatively well. And you have to do the best you can with what you’ve got.
"Most of the women I know in their thirties, forties and fifties who seem sexy and vibrant, it’s because they feel it. They have it going on in their lives. It’s not about how they look – it’s about how they feel.”
TV shows with Victoria Hamilton
Here are the shows we recommend watching if you're a fan of the actress Victoria Hamilton:
Victoria & Albert
Victoria Hamilton played Queen Victoria in the 2001 BBC drama Victoria & Albert, which was about the monarch's rise from a bullied princess to the most influential woman on the planet and the early years of her marriage with the Prince (played by Jonathan Firth).
She had particularly strong competition for the role, but she reigned successful, despite being relatively unknown at the time.
Doctor Foster
For two series, Victoria Hamilton played Anna in Doctor Foster, one of the BBC's most highly acclaimed programmes. Anna Baker and her husband Neil (Adam Jones) were neighbours to the main couple Gemma (Suranne Jones) and Simon (Bertie Carvel) and knew about Simon's affair with Kate, a university student (Jodie Comer), which is the main plot of the show.
Life
Three years after Doctor Foster, a spin-off show called Life was announced. This gem of a programme follows the intertwining stories of people who live in a house that has been divided into four flats in Manchester.
It stars Alison Steadman (Gavin & Stacey, Abigail's Party), Adrian Lester (Hustle, Trigger Point), Melissa Johns (Grantchester, Queenie) and Victoria Hamilton.
Victoria's character is back under the name of Belle and tries to build a new life for herself as a Pilates instructor in Manchester. However, when she first got the script, she didn't realise that it was the same person she would be playing.
“She does have a past, she was introduced to the public in Doctor Foster when she was dealing with the name of Anna. In fact, when Mike [Bartlett] sent me the script for Life, I started to read it and I was reading this wonderful character called Belle.", she said in a cast Q&A session.
“And as I kept reading, I kept thinking, 'Gosh, he's done it again.' Because she's wonderful, she really, really reminded me of Anna - except this is a character called Belle.”
So, she decided to do some digging and sent an email to the writer.
“And he just sent me back this very short email saying, 'Yes. It's Anna, Annabelle. Anna... Belle! It's using the second half of her name. Of course, it's the same woman. How could it be any other woman? What's wrong with you?'
“He didn't say, 'What is wrong with you?’ But it was there in a silent bracket!”
In a press statement, Mike Bartlett expressed why it was important to continue Annabelle's story, emphasising that we rarely see stories on screen about women in their 40s “starting again”.
“When I was writing some of her final scenes in Doctor Foster, the character surprised me when she said she was moving completely away to a new city: starting again.
“That felt like a story full of potential and one I hadn’t necessarily seen – a woman in her mid-40s, married for a lot of her adult life but now divorced, and keen to start again. I also found Belle’s voice came very easily when writing, and that’s a good sign there’s lots of fun to be had with the character.”
From love, parenthood, loss and self-discovery, each episode covers topics that most of us experience through life (hence the title of the show). Despite trying to move on, Belle is rattled by the reappearance of her ex-husband Neil (played by Adam Jones), and her troublesome teenage niece Maya (Erin Kellyman) moves in with her so, she turns to alcohol to try to cope with her collapsing life.
“In each one of the households featured in Life, each of the characters is in some way looking desperately for a connection with someone, or reconnection with someone that they’ve lost,” she said in the same statement.
“And you wouldn’t necessarily know that when you meet all these characters, but as the series goes on, you start to realise that that is what they’re all looking for.”, says Victoria.
The Crown
In seasons 1-2 of The Crown, Victoria Hamilton played Queen Elizabeth, Queen Mother. Her portrayal of the widow was full of warmth and charisma - particularly towards her family - and reflects her intelligence and savviness of the Queen consort. She underwent many physical changes, including wearing a bodysuit and a wig.
For these two seasons, The Crown was nominated in The Screen Actor's Guild for an Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series.
COBRA
In the political thriller COBRA, Victoria Hamilton takes on a senior role as the Prime Minister's Chief of Staff (played by Robert Carlyle). She's was formerly a war correspondent and throws herself into her work to avoid her home life which is in disarray.
So far, there have been three series of COBRA, which follow the government as it responds to major national crises (hence the title, which is the acronym for Cabinet Office Briefing Rooms).
You can watch all episodes of the Sky Original series COBRA on NOW TV.
Unforgotten
Victoria Hamilton joined the cast of Unforgotten when it returned for its sixth series. She played one of series six's four main suspects, Juliet Cooper, a History Lecturer and Faculty Head at a central London University.
Juliet is also mother to a teenage daughter and is the wife of Gerard Cooper, the man whose body is found.
Sinéad Keenan, the show's co-lead alongside Sanjeev Bhaskar, said that "watching and acting with Victoria Hamilton was quite something. She is so brilliant and so lovely with it. That was a real pleasure. I was very lucky".
Arabella Horspool is a Commercial Content Writer for Yours at Bauer Media. She's a bookworm who is passionate about TV, film and theatre. She enjoys cooking, scrapbooking, playing board games and spending time with her pet dogs, tortoise and chickens.