Charlotte Spencer

Charlotte Spencer (born 26 September 1991) is a British actress, singer and dancer. She is known for playing the female lead in The Living and the Dead.[1][2] Screen International named her a Star of Tomorrow 2015.[3]

Personal life
She was born in Harlow, Essex,[3][4][5] to Peter and Karen. She has a younger sister and brother.[6] Spencer said of her background "I come from a working class background; my dad’s a builder and my mum works in a school".[7] She started ballet aged 3 and has wanted to perform since then.[7] At the age of 11, her parents sent her to a drama school in London, at the Sylvia Young Theatre School in Marylebone.[3] Charlotte's parents remortgaged their house to support her acting career.[6] As of 2016 she lives with her parents when not working as an actor,[6] working with her grandmother at a charity shop and helping with the choir at her mother's infants school. She has a dog, Chip.[6]

Theatre
Spencer in the original London cast of Mary Poppins, Left to right (FRONT): Poppy Lee Friar, Jack Montgomery, Perry Millward, Harry Stott, Ben Watton, Jake Catterall, Nicola Bowman. Left to right (BACK): Charlotte Spencer, Faye Spittlehouse, Carrie Fletcher, with songwriter Robert B. Sherman. (Photo Date: 19 July 2004)

She got her acting break in Mary Poppins aged 12, appearing as Jane Banks in Richard Eyre's 2004 production of the musical.[3] In 2009, she played Bet in Oliver!.[8] In 2013, Eyre again cast Spencer, this time as Christine Keeler in the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Stephen Ward, alongside Charlotte Blackledge as Mandy Rice-Davies.[3][9][10] The show run was cancelled shortly afterwards.[11]

Television and film
Spencer appeared as Dexter Fletcher's daughter in ''Hotel Babylon''.[6] She was the voice of Angelina Ballerina on Angelina Ballerina: The Next Steps when she was 17, [''citation needed''] and has since worked as a voice actor, as Nettles in the 2018 TV series Watership Down and as a continuity announcer for the Disney Channel.[11] Spencer appeared in the films Wild Bill and Les Misérables in 2011[6][12] and then Dark Shadows with Johnny Depp in 2012.[6]

After her theatre appearance as Christine Keeler ended, Spencer had a small part in Line of Duty and then was cast by the same director as jockey Tina Fallon in the 2014 E4 TV series Glue.[13][11] She was nominated for a Supporting Actress BAFTA for this role in 2015.[3][14] Deadline Hollywood reported that she would star in Broad Squad;[15] in 2015 she appeared in a pilot of Broad Squad as a 1970s police officer on ABC,[3] which was not made into a series.[6] She starred as 'Niamh' in the BFI short, Above, which won Best Short Film at the National Film Awards UK.[16] She played the lead role, Lilly, in the film Bypass with George MacKay[7] and appeared as Ellie in the BBC2 TV series Stonemouth.[17] In 2015, she was nominated for best actress awards for Stonemouth at BAFTA Scotland.[18] In the BBC1 horror TV series The Living and the Dead, broadcast in June 2016, she played the role of a photographer turned housewife, Charlotte Appelby, with Colin Morgan.[19] She said of the role "since I was a child, I’ve always wanted to do a period drama".[20] She appeared in another period drama in autumn 2019, as Esther Denham in Sanditon, a TV adaptation of the unfinished Jane Austen novel.[11] She defended the inclusion of sex and nudity as historically accurate and "humanising".[21]

In May 2016, she filmed the BBC/NFTS short film Diagnosis in the lead role of Sally, a woman who acts in medical role play.[22] Spencer also play a hapless youth in the teen horror film Gateway, which uses the Momo Challenge as a plot device.[23]