Joanne Froggatt

Joanne Froggatt (; born 23 August 1980) is a British actress. From 2010 to 2015, she portrayed Anna Bates in the ITV period drama series Downton Abbey. For this role, she received three Emmy nominations for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series, and won the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress on Television in 2014. From 2017 to 2020, she starred in the ITV drama series Liar. Froggatt's early television appearances include Coronation Street (1997–1998), Bad Girls (1999), dinnerladies (1999) and A Touch of Frost (2001). She went on to star in the television films Danielle Cable: Eyewitness (2003), See No Evil: The Moors Murders (2006) and Murder in the Outback (2007), before winning the British Independent Film Award for Most Promising Newcomer for her leading role in the 2010 film In Our Name. Early life and education Froggatt was born and brought up in the village of Littlebeck in North Yorkshire. Her parents, Ann and Keith Froggatt, having run a corner shop, next started a rare-breed sheep farm on a smallholding near Whitby. Joanne has likened her childhood setting to the backdrop of Emily Brontë's classic novel Wuthering Heights. Froggatt initially joined a drama group in Scarborough, and then left her family home at the age of 13 to attend the Redroofs Theatre School in Maidenhead, Berkshire. Career In 1996, Froggatt made her TV debut in the long-running ITV drama The Bill, and shortly afterwards landed the role of teenage mother Zoe Tattersall in Coronation Street. She left the programme in 1998, when her character was written out. In 1999, she appeared in the first four episodes of the first series of prison drama Bad Girls, portraying teenage mother Rachel Hicks.