Claire Foy

Claire Elizabeth Foy (born 16 April 1984) is an English actress. She studied drama and screen studies at Liverpool John Moores University and trained at the Oxford School of Drama, where she appeared in four plays, including Watership Down. She made her screen debut in the pilot episode of Being Human (2008) and in an episode of the BBC soap opera Doctors (2008). Following her professional stage debut at the Royal National Theatre, she played the title role in the BBC One production of Little Dorrit (2008), and made her film debut as Anna in Season of the Witch (2011). She had main roles as Erin Matthews in the Channel 4 series The Promise (2011) and several other television films and miniseries, including as Kate Balfour in the NBC series Crossbones (2014). She received unanimous praise for her performance as Anne Boleyn in BBC2's Wolf Hall (2015), for which she was nominated for the British Academy Television Award for Best Actress and the Critics' Choice Television Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Movie/Miniseries. Since 2016, she has portrayed the young Queen Elizabeth II on the Netflix series The Crown, a role for which she has received critical acclaim and won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress - Television Series Drama and the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Drama Series, and was nominated for the BAFTA TV Award for Best Actress and a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series. 2Early life and education Foy was born at Stepping Hill Hospital in Stockport, the daughter of Caroline, who works for a pharmaceutical company, and David Foy, a sales consultant. She has said that her mother comes from "a massive Irish family." She grew up in Manchester and Leeds, the youngest of three children. Her family later moved to Longwick, Buckinghamshire for her father's job as a salesman for Rank Xero