Hermione Norris is an English actress born in February 1967 in London as the second of four children. When she was four years old, her parents, Helen and Michael Norris, got separated. Hermione Norris, along with her mother and siblings, moved to Derbyshire to live with her grandmother before returning to London a few years later. She went to Elmhurst Ballet School in Surrey on a scholarship and took up drama at an after-school club. She also completed her dance studies at the age of 17.
When she was 19, Hermione Norris enrolled at LAMDA and while she was there, she went to the Moscow Art Theatre School on a student exchange programme. Hermione Norris married Simon Wheeler, a British screenwriter and television producer in December 2002. They have two children - Wilf, born in June 2004 and Hero, born in August 2007.
Hermione Norris began her professional career by playing small roles in theatre as well as in television. She performed in several theatrical productions, like A Midsummer Night's Dream, Man and Superman, Three Judgements in One, September Tide, Look Back in Anger, Reader and Blinded by The Sun. In 2005, she returned back to the stage after a gap of 9 years to play the title role in the short play Petronella for Old Vic’s 24-hour play season.
Hermione Norris made her television debut in 1990 in Blood Rights, playing the role of Virginia. She also appeared in serials such as Agatha Christie's Poirot, Clarissa and Drop the Dead Donkey in the early stages of her career. Still, her career did not take off as expected and she worked on supermarket checkouts and shopping centres to make her ends meet. In fact, in 1996, she even considered dropping her acting plans to pursue a degree in law, after being out of work for four months.
However, Hermione Norris soon got her first career break, when she was offered the chance to portray Karen Marsden, a woman struggling to come to terms with the middle-class lifestyle, in Cold Feet. For her impressive performance in the serial, she was nominated for the Best Actress category in the British Comedy Awards in 2001. Hermione Norris also co-starred with Christopher Eccleston in Killing Time: The Millennium Poem, a BBC drama. In 2002, she made her appearance in the television film Falling Apart, in which she played a woman caught in an abusive relationship. The year also saw her share the screen with Robson Green, as Detective Inspector Carol Jordan in Wire in the Blood, a serial in which she continued to act till 2005. Hermione Norris also appeared in the 2003 TV remake of Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim. In 2005, she got the plum role of Ros Myers in Spooks, a BBC One spy drama. For her performance in Spooks, she collected her first ITV 3 Crime Thriller Best Actress Award in 2008. Hermione Norris has acted in three series of Kingdom since 2006.
Apart from television serials, Hermione Norris has also starred in a few movies. Her notable films include Born Romantic (2000), a British film directed by David Kane, Quicksand (2003), an action film starring Michael Keaton and Michael Caine and Separate Lies (2005), a British drama film directed by Julian Fellowes.
