Michelle Dockery is an English actress. She is best known for portraying Lady Mary Crawley in the hit TV series “Downton Abbey”.
So let’s dive into some amazing trivia and facts about her life and career.
- Her full name is Michelle Suzanne Dockery
- She was born on 15 December 1981
- She is an English actress
- She is best known for her leading performance as Lady Mary Crawley in the ITV television period drama series Downton Abbey
- For the role she was nominated for a Golden Globe Award and three consecutive Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series
- Dockery made her professional stage debut in His Dark Materials in 2004
- For her role as Eliza Doolittle in the 2007 London revival of Pygmalion, she was nominated for the Evening Standard Award
- For her role in the 2009 play Burnt by the Sun, she earned an Olivier Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress
- Dockery has appeared in the films Hanna (2011), Anna Karenina (2012) and Non-Stop (2014)
- On television, Dockery has also played lead roles on the drama series Good Behavior and the Netflix miniseries Godless
- For the later, she received her fourth Emmy nomination
- Michelle Dockery was born at Rush Green Hospital in Rush Green, Essex
- She grew up in Romford, in Essex, and she still has traces of an Estuary accent
- She says, “I’ll never sound like Lady Mary, although my Essex accent has softened over the years. But it comes back if I’ve had a couple of drinks or if I am around my family”
- Dockery has two older sisters, Louise and Joanne
- She was educated first at Chadwell Heath Academy
- She later studied at the Finch Stage School
- Dockery confirmed in a 2017 interview with Parade that if you asked her parents when she began performing they would answer that it was when she was 2 or 3 years old
- She remembers being 9 and performing for family members when they came to visit
- After her A Levels, she enrolled at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama
- There she was awarded the Gold Medal for Drama at her graduation in 2004
- On World Humanitarian Day 2014, Oxfam announced Dockery as its first ever Humanitarian Ambassador
- Michelle Dockery is also a patron of Changing Faces
- She supports a host of other charities
- In 2014, Dockery was one of nine British celebrities featured in a short film promoting Stand Up to Cancer UK
- Dockery started a relationship with John Dineen, from Waterfall, Ireland, in 2013
- The actress had been introduced to Dineen, then a public relations director at FTI Consulting in London, by Irish actor Allen Leech
- Leech was quoted as saying “John’s like family to me and I knew he’d really get on with Michelle. She’s a great girl – probably as far from Lady Mary as you could imagine”
- The couple were first pictured together when they were on holiday in Venice, Italy, during the 2013 Venice International Film Festival
- The couple made headlines in 2015
- Then it was reported that they were engaged
- With Dockery showing off a diamond ring to her co-stars during screen tests
- But they guarded their privacy closely, with Dockery only briefly referencing, in an interview in 2013
- In an interview in November 2015, she mentioned “I’ve got people around me who I can turn to for advice: my mum, and my partner, John”
- Dineen died from a rare form of cancer on 13 December 2015, at age 34, in Marymount Hospice in Cork
- With Dockery at his bedside
- In 2016, Dockery stated that her fiancé’s death was not something she wanted to talk about, but she allowed that acting served as a “release”
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