Emilia Fox is the actor cinema casts and then forgets to look at; television has had the sense to look for twenty years. Our film reviews barely notice her, which is cinema's loss and not hers.
Fi1m perspective
Watch what Emilia Fox does when someone else has the scene. She does not fidget for attention and she does not vanish; she listens, with a patience that makes the louder person look either better or worse than they are. It is a quiet gift, and the cinema has treated it the way quiet gifts usually are treated, by casting her as the sister, the second wife, the woman with the cello, and then pointing the camera at the man.
She started as Georgiana Darcy in the 1995 Pride and Prejudice, a summer job taken while reading English at Oxford, by her own account with no idea about acting. Two years later she was carrying Rebecca (1997) as the second Mrs de Winter, alongside Charles Dance, who would turn up opposite her again more than once. Her first feature was Roman Polanski's The Pianist (2002), as Dorota. Then in 2004 came the part that has outlasted everything else: Dr Nikki Alexander, the forensic pathologist in Silent Witness, which she has now played for more than twenty years and over two hundred episodes, longer than anyone else in the cast. In 2022 she took the title role in Signora Volpe, and a producer's credit with it.
We have reviewed two of her films and neither review mentions her, which tells you something about the parts. In The Pianist she plays Dorota, a cellist, and we admit we went back to the film looking for her and were a little ashamed by how little we had registered: Polanski's patience is spent entirely on Brody, and the restraint we admired in that film leaves nobody at its edges room to be more than a face. In Blithe Spirit (2020) she is Violet Bradman, with Julian Rhind-Tutt, who has been turning up beside her for twenty years, in an Edward Hall remake that swaps Coward's talk for pratfalls and shrieking. She is willing, like the rest of the cast, and the film wastes her along with Dench.
What the cinema never gave her, television did: time. She has said of The Pianist, "I loved working with Roman and Adrian [Brody], it was there that I learnt the difference between working on film and on tv." The difference, in her case, is that television let her keep one character for two decades, and the kindness that reads as filler in a two-hour film reads as a person when you have watched it for two hundred episodes. If you want to know what she does, her film credits will not tell you. The pathologist will.
Biography
Emilia Fox is an English actress. She was born in 1974 in London to actors Edward Fox and Joanna David, and studied English at St Catherine's College, Oxford.
Her feature film debut was as Dorota in Roman Polanski's The Pianist (2002). Other film roles include Sharon in Cashback (2007), Lady Victoria Wotton in Dorian Gray (2009), and Rosie Jones in Keeping Mum (2005). She won the Flaiano Film Award for Best Actress for her performance in The Soul Keeper (2002).
On television she has played Morgause in Merlin (2008) and appeared in series including Coupling (2000), Pride and Prejudice (1995) and Inside No. 9 (2014). She is a long-serving cast member of Silent Witness.
