Hattie Morahan

Harriet Jane "Hattie" Morahan (born 1978) is an English television, film and stage actress. Early life Morahan is the younger daughter of television and film director Christopher Morahan and actress Anna Carteret. Her older sister Rebecca is a theatre director. Morahan was educated at Frensham Heights School and followed her older sister Rebecca to New Hall, Cambridge, graduating with a BA in English in 2000. While at Cambridge, she directed and appeared in student productions, including A View from the Bridge, which won her 'the most outstanding performance' award at the 1999 National Student Drama Festival for her role as Catherine. Career She made her professional debut at the age of 17, playing the leading role of Una Gwithian in a two-part BBC television adaptation of The Peacock Spring (1996). Morahan joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2001, making her theatre debut at Stratford-upon-Avon in Love in a Wood and her London debut at the Barbican Theatre in December 2001 in Hamlet. Other credits for the company included Night of the Soul and Prisoner's Dilemma. At the Tricycle Theatre in March 2004 she played Ruby, a 1960s hippie who becomes a disenchanted 1980s political wife, for the Oxford Stage company revival of Peter Flannery's Singer. In the same year she first worked with Katie Mitchell at the National Theatre when she starred in the title role of Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis. In July 2005 she appeared again at the National in Nick Dear's Power, staged in the Cottesloe Theatre and also won acclaim at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, in September 2005 playing Viola in Ian Brown's production of Twelfth Night. In 2006 she played the leading role of Penelope Toop in Douglas Hodge's touring revival of Philip King's hit farce See How They Run. In the same year, for her Lyttelton Theatre performance as Nina in Katie Mitchell's staging of Chekhov's The Seagull, she was awarded second prize in the Ian Charleson Awards 2007. TV credits include Bodies and BBC One's Outnumbered where she portrays reoccurring character Jane. She has appeared in series 1, 2 and 4 of Outnumbered, as well as the Christmas Specials in 2009, 2011 and 2012. In January 2008, she appeared in the film The Bank Job and played a mounted policewoman in the ITV comedy drama pilot Bike Squad. Giving a career enhancing performance, she also played Elinor Dashwood in the BBC One three-part adaptation by Andrew Davies of Jane Austen's novel Sense and Sensibility, first broadcast on New Year's Day 2008. "Hattie Morahan's Elinor is as good a piece of acting as you're going to see this year", wrote Christopher Hart, Sunday Times Sunday 13 January 2008. On 13 June 2008, she won Best Actress at the 14th Shanghai Television Festival for her performance. --- From 8 August to 26 October 2013 Hattie Morahan reprises her role as Nora Helmer alongside Dominic Rowan, who returns as her husband Torvald, at the Duke of York's Theatre London. Hattie gave an exclusive interview regarding her career and role in the play. In July 2015, Morahan played the role of doomed mother Elizabeth Aldridge in the BBC’s two-part television adaptation of Sadie Jones’ debut novel The Outcast. Writing in The Guardian, Julia Raeside was impressed with Morahan’s portrayal, writing, "She is so perfectly cast, the lack of her is palpable on screen. We miss her too". Personal life Morahan is engaged to the actor and director Blake Ritson, whom she met at Cambridge. She worked as script supervisor on three of his short films, also as costume designer and performer on Good Boy (2008). "He needs help behind the scenes," she told the Sunday Times. "I'm happy to supply it. I just like to get on with it."