Gina McKee
Born: April 14 1964
Where: Sunderland, Tyne & Wear, UK
The BAFTA-winning coalminer's daughter has impressed in roles ranging from Mary in the TV classic Our Friends in the North to wheelchair-bound Bella in Notting Hill.
The daughter of a County Durham miner, McKee came from an "industrial white working-class background" in Peterlee.
While schooling "went by the by", McKee was attracted to acting thanks to an inspirational teacher at Dean House Juniors school.
She joined a local youth theatre group which devised its own plays and then she landed a three-month stint on the Tyne Tees children's series Quest of Eagles.
When she was 15 she began spending her summer with the National Youth Theatre in London.
Despite being turned down by drama colleges including Bristol and LAMDA, she got an Equity card and landed TV roles in Auf Wiedersehen Pet and Inspector Morse.
She made her big screen debut in 1988 as Nurse Gladwell alongside Hugh Grant in Ken Russell's Lair of the White Worm and went on to land roles in Wilt and The Rachel Papers.
Subsequent appearances included TV work such as Drop The Dead Donkey and Minder but it was her 1996 role as Mary Soulsby in Our Friends in the North that cemented her reputation.
Other notable TV work included a variety of roles in Chris Morris's controversial spoof documentary series Brass Eye.
In 1997, she co-starred opposite Ewan Bremner in The Life Of Stuff and was critically acclaimed for her performance in the low budget Croupier with Clive Owen in 1998.
She went on to star in Stephen Daldry's Eight and Michael Winterbottom's Wonderland but it was Notting Hill, opposite Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts, that she really grabbed the limelight.
In 1999, she starred in Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc and on the small screen she also impressed as Irene Forsyte née Heron in the Forsyte Saga.
Roles followed in the Hollywood comedy drama Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and she also appeared in The Reckoning and Mirrormask.
She starred in Greyfriars Bobby and played Colin Firth's wife in the adapatation of Blake Morrison's And When Did You Last See Your Father?
Recent work includes Joe Wright's critically-acclaimed Atonement with Keira Knightley and James McAvoy.
