Post your questions for Imelda Staunton

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She’s acting royalty – literally, having played Queen Elizabeth II in The Crown – but what questions would you ask her? It is perhaps fitting that Imelda Staunton ended up playing Queen Elizabeth II in the last two series of The Crown, considering she has been acting royalty for years. Her film career has seen her voice champion egg-layer Bunty in 2000’s Chicken Run, followed by roles in Mike Leigh’s 2004 drama Vera Drake and the 2005 comedy Nanny McPhee. In 2014, she played the formidable Welsh miners’ strike campaigner Hefina in Pride . She also plays Lady Maud Bagshaw in the first two Downton Abbey films, and voices Paddington’s beloved Aunt Lucy in all three Paddington films. For a whole generation, however, she will always be Dolores Umbridge in two of the later Harry Potter films, where she somehow made a pink cardigan almost as frightening as Voldemort. On TV, she has cropped up in everything from Little Britain and Doctor Who to Psychoville, Brassic and a memorable guest appear...
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Piper Laurie obituary

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American actor best known for her roles in the classic films The Hustler, Carrie and Children of a Lesser God

For those who remembered Piper Laurie from her days as a contract player in a series of formulaic escapist pictures made by Universal Studios in the 1950s, it was hard to believe that the lonely young woman in Robert Rossen’s The Hustler (1961), who takes her own life when she is rejected by the pool shark Paul Newman, was one and the same. This Oscar-nominated performance was a surprise, and nothing Laurie did before or after touched it.

Having proved that she could act, Laurie, who has died aged 91, immediately retired from the cinema. She returned 15 years later, in another guise, this time specialising in playing harridans, principally in horror movies. The most celebrated was Brian De Palma’s repulsive and compulsive Carrie (1976), for which she was also Oscar-nominated, this time as the religious mother of the pubescent Sissy Spacek, intoning “the first sin was intercourse”.

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