1. Anna Louise Friel was born on 12 July 1976 and is an English actress.
29 Facts About Anna Friel
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Anna Friel first achieved fame as Beth Jordache in the Channel 4 soap opera Brookside, later coming to international prominence with her role as Charlotte "Chuck" Charles on ABC's Pushing Daisies, for which she received a nomination for the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Comedy Series.
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Anna Louise Friel was born on 12 July 1976 in Rochdale, Greater Manchester.
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Anna Friel is a former French teacher and folk guitarist, who now owns a web design company.
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Anna Friel's brother Michael is a doctor, who in his youth did television advertising work for Hovis.
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Anna Friel began her training as an actress at Oldham Theatre Workshop.
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Anna Friel was cast the following year as Beth Jordache in the Channel 4 soap Brookside, a role she played for two years.
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In 1995, Anna Friel won a National Television Award in the category of "Most Popular Actress" for her work on Brookside.
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Anna Friel then played leading roles in small-screen adaptations of Charles Dickens' Our Mutual Friend and Robert Louis Stevenson's St Ives, and co-starred in several British films, such as wartime period drama The Land Girls, crime drama Rogue Trader, and slapstick comedy Mad Cows.
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Anna Friel's Alice is both the nihilistic core of the play and its tender center, and the paradoxical mixture of toughness and fragility [she] brings to it are essential to the play's deepest truths.
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Anna Friel had leading roles in the comedy-drama films An Everlasting Piece and Sunset Strip, with her performance in Piece attracting particular praise.
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Between March and May 2001, Anna Friel appeared in an adaptation of Frank Wedekind's Lulu at the Almeida Theatre; her West End stage debut.
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Anna Friel was then cast as Attorney Megan Delaney in The Jury, an American legal drama series that ran on Fox for a single season in 2004.
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In 2007, Anna Friel was cast as Charlotte "Chuck" Charles in Pushing Daisies, an American dramedy series created by Bryan Fuller, which aired on ABC from October that year until June 2009.
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Anna Friel was offered a number of roles on American television, but turned them down to focus on her film career.
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In November 2009, Anna Friel won an RTS Award for "Best Performance in a Drama Series" for her work as Dee, a struggling single mother who turns to prostitution, in BBC One's The Street.
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Anna Friel had key parts in three films released in 2010: self-destructive Iris in the Woody Allen ensemble comedy You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, ex-drug addict Melissa in Neil Burger's lucrative sci-fi thriller Limitless, and depressed alcoholic Briony in the gangster drama London Boulevard, with her work in the latter being described as "engaging".
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Anna Friel then returned to the West End in a new version of Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya at the Vaudeville Theatre, receiving praise for her role as aristocratic newlywed Yelena.
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The NBC show ran for a single season between April and June 2015, with some critics comparing it unfavourably to Homeland; though Anna Friel's performance was roundly praised.
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Anna Friel starred that same year in the World War II-set Norwegian miniseries The Heavy Water War, and in the drama film Urban and the Shed Crew, based on the memoir of the same name.
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Anna Friel began playing the eponymous Marcella Backland in the British Nordic noir detective series, Marcella, in 2016.
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In 2019, Anna Friel collected the International Emmy Award for Best Actress for her portrayal of Backland, which Decider felt was "extraordinary":.
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Not only does this allow Anna Friel to explore her wide range, but it adds to the unsettling tone of this show.
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Marcellas third and final season debuted on Netflix in 2020, with Anna Friel commenting afterwards that a fourth season was unlikely to happen.
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Anna Friel played Nicolette "Nicky" Roman, a singer-songwriter trying to continue her family's legacy while forging her own path in the country music industry.
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Anna Friel's work drew acclaim, with Film Threat commenting that her "lived-in" performance was key to Hearts success.
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Anna Friel then appeared as Nicky, a Liverpudlian nurse helping one of her patients unravel a dark secret, in the British psychological thriller Locked In.
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In 2001, Anna Friel began a relationship with actor David Thewlis, after the pair met on a flight to Cannes.
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Later that year, Anna Friel collapsed and was rushed to a hospital, needing emergency surgery and two blood transfusions for a ruptured ovarian cyst.