Imelda Staunton pays tribute to her daughter, Bessie Carter, in a triumphant night at the Olivier Awards – now meet the first family of British theatre

When it comes to this trio, talent truly does run in the family. As Hello, Dolly! star Imelda Staunton claims her fifth Olivier Award, delve into her thespian dynasty, including her daughter, Bessie Carter â?? star of Bridgerton, Outrageous, and the Tatler May cover

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Bessie Carter stars on the cover of Tatler's May issue ahead of her turn as Nancy Mitford in Outrageous. Her own family dynasty is the stuff of British theatrical legend, too.

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Imelda Staunton cemented her status as one of Britain’s greatest thespians at the Olivier Awards on Sunday, winning Best Actress in a Musical for her performance in Hello, Dolly! It is the fifth time that the actress has claimed a prize at the awards, one a night that also saw triumphs for The Years, Titanique, and Giant.

Family was clearly on Staunton’s mind as she addressed the gathered crowd at London’s Royal Albert Hall, with the 69-year-old paying tribute to her mother and her daughter, Bessie Carter, with whom she is set to co-star in the upcoming production of Mrs Warren’s Profession at the Garrick Theatre.

‘If I may say something to my late mum, whose name was Bridie McNicholas,’ she said. ‘Mum, I'm here at the Albert Hall. I've got a prize, but more importantly, I'm about to do a play with your granddaughter. I wish you were here.’

A young Bessie Carter and her father, Jim Carter, accompanied her mother Imelda Staunton to the 77th Annual Academy Awards in 2005 to celebrate Staunton's nominated role in Vera Drake

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Of course, Bessie Carter is no stranger to a dynasty. Tatler’s May cover star made her name in Bridgerton, playing Prudence Featherington, the older sister of Lady Whistledown – rubbing shoulders with earls and eligibles on the marriage market. For her latest project, the talented Ms Carter is taking on one of Britain’s most storied (and controversial) family trees, starring as socialite and author Nancy Mitford in the BBC’s upcoming period drama Outrageous. The series will follow the lavish, laviscious lives of the Mitford sisters, the daughters of the 2nd Baron Redesdale, whose fortunes as Bright Young Things saw some flirt with fame and others with fascism.

Imelda Staunton in Vera Drake

©Fine Line Features/Courtesy Everett Collection

With Staunton as her mother and Downton Abbey actor Jim Carter as her father, Bessie’s most illustrious dynasty might well be her own; ; the trio have even shared the screen together in 2007’s Cranford, with Carter fille playing the maid to her father’s Captain Brown and her mother’s Miss Octavia Pole. As her mother claims the biggest prize in British theatre, what better time to celebrate Bessie and her parents – proof that talent truly does run in the family?

‘I wasn’t aware of my parents being famous until my mum did Vera Drake and was nominated for an Oscar,’ Bessie once said of her actorly roots. ‘That would have been about when I was 11 or 12. Until then, they were just actors. That was their job. It was just normal.’ While Dame Imelda Staunton may have reached the upper echelons of the Academy with her 2004 turn in Mike Leigh’s tale of a woman who performs illegal abortions in 1950s London, some might consider it a little humble to describe her prior career as ‘just’ an actor.

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After graduating from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1976, Staunton carved out a career in the theatre, with an early role as the lead character in another Shaw play, Saint Joan. A performance as Lucy Lockit in a 1982 production of The Beggar’s Opera at the National saw her claim her first Olivier Award nomination (wins would follow across four decades, including three gongs for performances in Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods, Sweeney Todd, and Gypsy). That year was a milestone for the actress: during rehearsals for a revival of Guys and Dolls, she met her co-star and future husband, Jim Carter (Bessie would later rehearse Dear Octopus in the very room where her parents first locked eyes). ‘We worked together for a year,’ Staunton told The Telegraph of their backstage romance, ‘and it was a slow burn rather than a heady rush of passion.’

Family portrait: Dame Imelda Staunton poses with Jim Carter Bessie Carter after being made a Dame Commander of the British Empire at an Investiture ceremony at Windsor Castle

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A relationship between two working actors can become very complicated, very fast (night shoots, jetting around to international locales, the trappings of The Method), but Staunton and Jim Carter were willing to make career sacrifices in the name of their marriage and raising a family together. ‘Success is a really tricky word, and it should be spelled with a very small S,’ Staunton explained to Vogue. ‘I think it poisons people. I feel Jim and I have made our lives work as a marriage within this business, and we take our life more seriously than our jobs.’

Not that these two consummate professionals would ever phone it in, of course. ‘We both take [the job] very seriously,’ she added. ‘But you go: “what’s the most important thing here? That I play another part? Or that we go on a very nice holiday, or that we have that time in the garden, that we have our life?”’

‘We take our lives more seriously than our jobs,’ Staunton said of her relationship with Carter, who married one year after meeting while rehearsing Guys and Dolls in 1982

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The husband and wife duo attend the World Premiere of Downton Abbey: A New Era at Leicester Square in 2022

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The pair certainly did have their life together, tying the knot in 1983 and welcoming Bessie ten years later. But they managed to balance family with no small measure of success. Before her Oscar-nomination in 2004, Imelda Staunton had film roles including 1991’s Antonia and Jane (dubbed ‘The thinking person’s Thelma and Louise’), Sense and Sensibility alongside Emma Thompson in 1995, and in 2003 she played Lady Brown in Stephen Fry’s Bright Young Things, an adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, which, in a novelisitc twist of fate, was dedicated to Diana Mitford, then married to Bryan Guinness.

Imelda Staunton nearly ‘stole the show’ as Dolores Umbridge in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix – despite such illustrious co-stars as Emma Thompson and Maggie Smith

©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection

After Vera Drake’s nominations at the Oscars (and the Golden Globes, and the Screen Actors’ Guild Awards) came the film role for which Staunton is perhaps best known: the odious witch Dolores Umbridge in 2007’s Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. In a delightfully malicious turn described by critics as ‘coming close to stealing the show’ and by Staunton herself as ‘a bloody monster’, the actress was nominated for Best British Actress in a Supporting Role at the London Film Critics Circle Awards. ‘Yet again,’ she would reflect on the part, ‘I have embraced a completely and utterly deluded woman.’

Delusions of Shakespearean proportion would abound the next year in A Bunch of Amateurs, which saw Staunton share the screen with Burt Reynolds as he played a washed-up Hollywood star begrudgingly starring as King Lear in an Am Dram Shakespeare production. Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip gave the film their royal stamp of approval, attending the Leicester Square premiere that November.

Staunton received critical acclaim for her turn as Queen Elizabeth II in the final two seasons of The Crown

Justin Downing/©Netflix/Courtesy Everett Colle

The actress would go on to cultivate a unique relationship with the late Queen, not only performing for her 90th Birthday celebrations but also playing her in the final seasons of The Crown – a role she admitted gave her ‘quite a few’ sleepless nights. It was while she was filming for the Netflix period drama that Elizabeth II died: news that left Staunton ‘inconsolable’ when she heard the announcement. ‘I was very glad I wasn’t due to be working the next day,’ she told Radio Times. ‘They couldn’t have filmed on this face. The outpouring of grief took me by surprise and might not have been so acute for me had I not been playing her.’ The performance won the actress nominations for Golden Globe Awards, Emmy Awards, and a BAFTA Award.

Quite the career – certainly more than enough to fill a few hours of conversation over a family dinner in Staunton and Carter’s West Hampstead home. But any supper guests would be treated not only to tales of Imelda Staunton’s legendary oeuvre but also stories from her husband’s own history at the pinnacle of British theatre, film, and television.

Jim Carter is best known as Mr Carson in Downton Abbey – a role he was initially hesitant to accept

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Jim Carter is perhaps best known for his role as Mr Carson in ITV’s Downton Abbey, which bagged him four Emmy nominations. Like his wife, Carter has a penchant for period dramas, with notable film performances including Charles James Fox in The Madness of King George (1994), Lord Hastings in 1995’s Richard III (alongside Ian McKellen and Carter’s frequent collaborator, Maggie Smith), and Ralph Bashford in Shakespeare in Love (alongside Staunton).

Despite these Shakespearean turns, Jim was once described by his wife as having a unique approach to the theatrical canon: ‘He has never been the sort of actor who yearns to play Hamlet,’ she told The Telegraph. ‘Maybe it's because he came to acting from performing in the circus. He has always done just what he wants to do.’

Imelda Staunton and Jim Carter attend Chelsea Flower Show press day in 2016

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Indeed, after joining the Young Vic in 1978 and acting in productions of The Tempest, Richard III, and Faust, Jim Carter left the stage behind and travelled to America, where she enrolled in circus school to learn juggling, unicycling, and how to walk a tightrope. Upon returning to the theatre, he would, of course, meet Staunton during Guys and Dolls, but also play the Cowardly Lion opposite his wife’s Dorothy in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s The Wizard of Oz in 1987.

True fame came later, though, with the premier of Downton Abbey in 2010. Carter was initially reluctant to accept the role, having never taken part in a television show before. ‘I'd never wanted to be pigeonholed in a way, because if you’re in a television series, then you're in people's sitting rooms every Wednesday night or Sunday night,’ he revealed to Riverstone Living. ‘[Y]ou become very, very familiar, and people feel they know you. I wouldn't have taken Downton Abbey if I had been 30, but being 60-plus when I took it, I was happy to do that.’

Staunton alongside Laura Carmichael and Maggie Smith in 2019's Downton Abbey, which saw the actress share the screen with her husband

Liam Daniel/© Focus Features/Courtesy Everett Collection

A red carpet family: Bessie Carter poses with her parents and her boyfriend, Sam Phillips, at the world premiere of Wonka in 2023

Neil Mockford

Staunton and Carter would go on to share the screen once more in the first film adaptation of Downton Abbey, with Imelda playing Maud Bagshaw, lady-in-waiting to Queen Mary. ‘I saw less of her than I do at home,’ the actor joked at a press conference ahead of the premiere, adding that he ‘refused to serve her wine’ during the regal dining scenes ‘in case she got overexcited and expected that kind of behaviour at home!’

An impressive family scrapbook, then, for Bessie Carter to flick through as she prepares to follow in her parents footsteps as the Queen of the period drama with Outrageous – as well as stepping on stage with her mother later this year. Few other actors can place a red carpet family portrait on their mantlepiece, but the Carter clan posed together at the premier of Wonka, with Bessie joined by her boyfriend, Sam Carter, who she met on the set of Bridgerton, in what is becoming a delightful family tradition. How’s that for a Christmas card?

The return of the Mitfords! Bessie Carter is Tatler's May 2025 cover star

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