
Joanna Scanlan is an actress who excels at playing grieving, dogged women. In The Invisible Woman, she played Charles Dickens’ long-suffering wife Catherine; in her BAFTA-award winning appearance in After Love she played a woman whose husband dies and leaves her with more questions than answers.
In Channel 4’s new 6-part drama The Light in the Hall, she not so much plays as inhabits the role of Sharon Roberts, a woman whose daughter, Ela, went missing, presumed murdered, eighteen years ago.