Charlotte Spencer (born 26 September 1991) is an English actress, dancer and singer. She played the female lead in The Living and the Dead.[1][2]Screen International magazine named her a Star of Tomorrow 2015.[3]
Early and personal life
Spencer was born on 26 September 1991 in Harlow, Essex,[3][4] to Peter and Karen. She has a younger sister and brother.[5] Spencer said of her background, "I come from a working class background; my dad's a builder and my mum works in a school."[6] She started ballet aged three and wanted to perform since then.[6] At the age of 11, her parents sent her to the Sylvia Young Theatre School in Marylebone, London.[3] Her parents remortgaged their house to support her acting career.[5] In 2016,[needs update] she lived with her parents when not working as an actor,[5] and worked with her grandmother at a charity shop and helps with the choir at her mother's infants' school. She has a dog, Chip.[5]
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 the jockey Tina Fallon in the 2014 E4 television series Glue.[11][7] She was nominated for the British Academy Television Award for Best Supporting Actress for this role in 2015.[3][12]Deadline Hollywood reported that she would star in Broad Squad;[13] 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.[5] She starred as Niamh in the BFI short, Above, which won Best Short Film at the National Film Awards UK.[14] She played the lead role, Lilly, in the film Bypass with George MacKay[6] and appeared as Ellie in the BBC2 television series Stonemouth.[15] In 2015, she was nominated for best actress awards for Stonemouth at BAFTA Scotland.[16] In the BBC1 horror television series The Living and the Dead, broadcast in June 2016, she played the role of Charlotte Appelby, a photographer turned housewife, with Colin Morgan.[17] She said of the role, "Since I was a child, I've always wanted to do a period drama."[18] She appeared in another period drama in autumn 2019, as Esther Denham in Sanditon, a television adaptation of the unfinished Jane Austen novel.[7] She defended the inclusion of sex and nudity as historically accurate and "humanising".[19]
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.[20] Spencer will also play[needs update] a hapless youth in the teen horror film Gateway, which uses the Momo Challenge as a plot device.[21]
