Anna Maxwell Martin

Anna Maxwell Martin changed how pressure looks on screen.

She won two BAFTAs early in her career, for Bleak House and Poppy Shakespeare, then kept building one of the most truthful bodies of work on British television.

In Motherland, Line of Duty and Until I Kill You, her characters often carry the part of life people prefer not to look at: exhaustion, grief, fear, rage, duty, survival, the quiet panic of holding everything together.

No gloss. No performance of perfection. No need to make women softer, prettier or easier to like.

Anna makes ordinary pressure feel monumental.

Few actors have shown British womanhood with such sharpness, humour and emotional truth.

Anna has.

Photographed by Sane Seven for The Sunday Times cover story