After Dinner Speakers: Imelda Staunton, Harry Hill, Huey Lewis & The News

Imelda Staunton is a three-time winner of England's most prestigious theater prize, the Olivier Award, for roles in A Chorus of Disapproval in 1985, The Corn Is Green in the same year, and Into the Woods in 1991. Not until 1993, however, did she receive international attention. That was the year she portrayed Margaret in Kenneth Branagh's acclaimed film production of William Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, working with her old Cambridge University pal, Emma Thompson. Shakespeare, of course, was hot in the 1990s, along with novelist Jane Austen. Following the thermal glow, Staunton played Charlotte Palmer in a film adaptation of Austen's Sense and Sensibility in 1995, Maria in a film adaptation of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night in 1996, and the nurse in the Oscar-winning film Shakespeare in Love in 1998, in which her husband, Jim Carter, also performed. With the rest of the actors in that film, Staunton and Carter shared a Screen Actors' Guild Award for Best Cast. During this period, Staunton was heard but not seen in animated films, performing voice roles in the TV production Mole's Christmas (1995) and the films The Ugly Duckling (1997), The Canterbury Tales (1998), and Chicken Run (2000). Staunton was born in England on September 1, 1953, to parents of Irish descent. After completing her studies at Cambridge, she performed mainly in stage dramas, including productions of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), and later in television series. A versatile performer who sings as well as acts, Staunton played the lead role of Dorothy in the RSC's 1988 production of The Wizard of Oz, earning an Olivier Award nomination. She has also performed in such musicals as The Beggar's Opera, Cabaret, Guys and Dolls, and Grease. In 1999, in one of her best TV roles, Staunton teamed with Bob Hoskins to play Mr. and Mrs. Wilkins Micawber in the BBC/Masterpiece Theatre miniseries David Copperfield, one of the finest adaptations of a Dickens novel ever produced. In 2000, she took on a daring role, playing the wife of a pub-crawling Irishman who turns into a rat -- as in rodent. Critics loved the film, and Staunton won an Irish Academy Award nomination for her role as the rat's wife, Conchita. But, alas, the film never made it to theaters, going instead straight to video. ~ Mike Cummings, All Movie Guide