Hermione Norris NUDE

Hermione Norris (born 1968) is an English actress.

Norris was born the second of four children to Michael and Helen Norris, the latter a health visitor, in 1968.[1] Her parents divorced when she was five years old, and she moved with her mother and siblings to live with her grandmother in Derbyshire, but moved back to London a few years later. She failed her eleven plus exam but won a scholarship to Elmhurst Ballet School in Surrey. She took up drama at an after-school club, performing there alongside her dance studies until she left aged 17. For the next two years she did "various office jobs to get by" while living in London with friends. At age 19 she enrolled at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA).[2] On an exchange to the Moscow Art Theatre School she played Nina in a production of The Seagull.
Her earliest television roles include appearances in Agatha Christie's Poirot, the television serial Clarissa and a 1991 episode of Drop the Dead Donkey. She continued to make guest appearances in series such as Between the Lines and Casualty. After being out of work for four months in 1996, she considered quitting acting and reading for a degree in law, intending to become a solicitor.[2] However, she got a part in Cold Feet playing Karen Marsden, a middle-class woman who feels trapped by her middle-class lifestyle. Norris appeared in every episode and was nominated for a British Comedy Award for Best Actress in 2001.[4]

During the six years Cold Feet ran, Norris appeared in a leading role in the BBC drama Berkley Square, Killing Time: The Millennium Poem, starring opposite Christopher Ecclestone, and the 2002 television film Falling Apart, playing a woman in a violent relationship. In 2002 she co-starred with Robson Green in Wire in the Blood, playing Detective Inspector Carol Jordan. She stayed with the series until 2005 when she was replaced by Simone Lahbib. Further film roles include an appearance in an adaptaion of Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim, and in David Kane's Born Romantic.

At the end of 2005 she was cast in the BBC One spy drama Spooks, playing Ros Myers.[5] She returned for eight of the ten episodes in the 2007 series. Since 2006 she has filmed two series of Kingdom playing Beatrice Kingdom, the deranged half-sister of Stephen Fry's character. She took the role as a change of pace from the "ice maiden" characters she often portrays