Emma Fielding

The lapsed Roman Catholic daughter of a British Army soldier, Fielding spent much of her childhood in Malaysia and Nigeria, and a period in Malvern above her grandparents' betting shop. Whilst studying at the Berkhamsted Collegiate boarding school, she won a place at the University of Cambridge to study law, but abandoned it and spent a gap year which included five months in a West Bank kibbutz picking watermelons, and as an usherette at the Oxford Apollo; before embarking on the study of acting at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama.

After graduation she worked for the Royal National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company, coming to the attention of critics in 1993's RSC production of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, in which she created the role of Thomasina, and then most notably in John Ford's The Broken Heart for which she won the Dame Peggy Ashcroft Award for Best Actress and the Ian Charleson Award. She made her Broadway theatre debut in 2003 in Noel Coward's Private Lives. She has also appeared in numerous radio plays for the BBC, including playing Esme in Tom Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll, a role she also played in the West End. More recently, she appeared in the BBC TV mini-series Cranford.

In 2009 she appeared as Daisy alongside Timothy West in the BBC Radio 4 adaptation of John Mortimer's "Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders".

 Awards and nominations

• Fielding was nominated for a 1999 Laurence Olivier Award for Best Supporting Performance for her role in The School for Scandal in the 1998 season.
• She was nominated for a 2002 Laurence Olivier Theatre Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role of 2001 for her performance in Private Lives at the Albery Theatre, London. She won a Theatre World Award for outstanding Broadway debut for the same role when the show was produced on Broadway in 2002.
• She was awarded the 1993 Critics' Circle Theatre Award for Most Promising Newcomer for her performances in Arcadia and The School for Wives.