Overview
Anna Theodora Chancellor (born 27 April 1965) is a British actress who has received nominations for BAFTA and Olivier Awards.
Background and early life
Chancellor was born in Richmond, England to barrister John Paget Chancellor, eldest son of Sir Christopher Chancellor, and Mary Jolliffe, a daughter of Lord Hylton. The Chancellor family were Scottish gentry who had owned land at Quothquan since 1432.
Chancellor was brought up in Somerset and educated at St Mary's School, Shaftesbury, which was a Roman Catholic boarding school for girls in Dorset, but left at sixteen to live in London, later describing her early years there as "quite wild". In her early twenties she married the poet Jock Scot (1952–2016), with whom she had a daughter in 1988 while still studying at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. She separated from Scot a few years later. She got her first acting role on television playing Mercedes Page in Jupiter Moon, a BSkyB soap, then came a commercial for Boddingtons beer and a part in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), playing Henrietta (nicknamed "Duckface") opposite Hugh Grant.
Chancellor is a niece of the journalist Alexander Chancellor, a great-granddaughter of Raymond Asquith (son of the liberal prime minister H. H. Asquith), a first cousin of both the actress Dolly Wells and the model Cecilia Chancellor, a second cousin of the actress Helena Bonham Carter, and the great niece of Jane Austen eight generations removed. Chancellor herself has spoken of her lineage, stating:
From Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).