Michelle Suzanne Dockery (born 15 December 1981 in Rush Green, London) is an English actress. She started out in theater and transitioned to television films and guest roles in ongoing series, and became well-known to international audiences for her role as the spirited heiress Lady Mary Crawley on
Downton Abbey and its
2019 and
2022 film sequels. This led to more international work including US television series and feature film roles. Other notable works include the series
Godless and the films
Anna Karenina and
The Gentlemen.
Filmography:
Tropes associated with her work include:
- Awesome, Dear Boy: This seems to motivate her a fair bit:
- Joined Hanna as the villain's decoy who gets her neck snapped after just one scene because she thought the film was "cool", and it let her go to Berlin.
- Pursued the role of Alice in Godless partly because of the shooting, riding and other Old West activities, calling Westerns a "sandbox" that British actors rarely get to play in.
- Was attracted to playing Rosalind in The Gentlemen because she was a fan of other Guy Ritchie crime films like Snatch. and Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels, and because she wanted to play a role with something closer to her own accent.
- Took the role of Estella in This Town instantly when she saw that her second scene was performing an emotional a cappella rendition of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" at a funeral. Turns out, she's quite good at singing.
- Costume Drama: Has appeared in many of these on stage and screen, but her breakout role in Downton Abbey is the example she's best known for. Post-Downton, she has appeared mostly in other genres.
- Fake American: Has deployed a generic American accent in Self/Less, Good Behavior (in which she also adopts several in-universe fake accents for her character's various disguises), and Defending Jacob, a deliberately sickly-sweet Southern twang in Hanna, and a more Western-appropriate drawl in Godless. She also uses an American accent in Boy Kills World, although as it takes place in an unidentified dystopian city state and her character has a Dutch surname it's unclear whether the character is supposed to actually be American.
- Ms. Fanservice: Generally averted as most of her characters tend to be fairly conservative in the way they act and dress, with sexual scenes of any kind being rare or mostly implied. The only real exceptions are the 2016-2017 series Good Behavior and Godless; in the former her character Letty is a seductive con artist and thief in an… energetic relationship with a hitman, so provocative clothing, lingerie scenes and sex scenes are a Once an Episode occurrence, and in the latter Dockery appears topless for the only time in her career, although her hard-working ranch owner character Alice is otherwise not really sexualised at all beyond protagonist Roy's attraction to her.
- Playing Against Type: Best known as the Aloof Dark-Haired Girl and Defrosting Ice Queen Lady Mary, Dockery has stayed away from Costume Drama since Downton ended, instead playing roles like:
- Singing Voice Dissonance: Has said that she suffered from this in her youth, impressing at musical auditions with her singing voice but then losing the roles when she spoke normally and her strong Essex accent came out.
- Typecasting:
- Quite often plays a Broken Bird or
Stoic Woobie, usually with a fair amount of trauma they’re trying to keep a lid on. Broken Tears, Inelegant Blubbering or Cathartic Scream tend to be the result if they can’t. - She has also been repeatedly cast as widows and/or single mothers, commonly (but not always) with a distant or strained relationship with their children.
- What Could Have Been: Was almost cast as Sophie in Mamma Mia! (the part eventually went to Amanda Seyfried) but turned it down in order to take a role in a play.
