Alumna wins Golden Globe

Claire Foy, star of the £100m Netflix series, The Crown, and graduate of LJMU, has won a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a TV series.

Famed for her lead role as the Queen in the hit programme, Claire studied Drama and Film Studies at the University from 2003 and graduated in 2006 with a 2.1.

The Crown is an American-British television drama series, which has enjoyed huge success on both sides of the Atlantic since its release last month. In addition to Claire's Golden Globe, the programme itself won Best TV Series (Drama).

Based on the award-winning play ‘The Audience’, about the early reign of Queen Elizabeth II, the first series was released in November 2016 and has been much acclaimed. It aims to give accurate historical accounts of Queen Elizabeth's reign, and such is its popularity that a second season has already been commissioned.

Programme Leader for Drama, Mike McCormack, remembers Claire as an LJMU student. Talking fondly about her, he said: “I’d like to congratulate Claire for her amazing performance in The Crown, and for winning best actress for a TV series for her portrayal as the Queen. It is richly deserved and we hope our students and graduates are inspired by her success and go on to achieve great things in their chosen fields. 

“Her talent and ability as an actor was very obvious from the time she arrived at LJMU. She was always extremely pleasant, calm, personable and she was very much a worker – she quietly got on with everything she had to do. Every year we run an exercise call ‘The Directorials’, which we still do now, and during one production, Claire played an unhappy landlord’s wife, smoking a cigarette, sitting on a bar stool. She delivered the lines with such conviction that I can still envisage the exact scene today. She was, simply put, extraordinarily memorable.”

On Claire’s role as the Queen, The Guardian commented: “Foy’s performance as Elizabeth Mountbatten is as ruthlessly unshowy as the woman herself. It’s a considerable challenge to play a character who becomes more and more fiercely restricted over time, but Foy manages to register every layer of misery and frustration as Elizabeth Ordinarius evolves into Elizabeth Regina, seeking a way to reconcile the conflicts of personal freedom and desire, wifehood and queendom and to work out quite what to do with advice such as the prime minister’s: ‘Let them see only the eternal in you’.”

Other productions starring Claire include the BBC's Wolf Hall, when she played Anne Boleyn, Little Dorrit, also on the BBC, in which she had the title role, and Channel 4's The Promise. In 2013 she played Lady Macbeth opposite James McAvoy at the Trafalgar Studios.