Georgie Glen is a Scottish actress who deftly handles character roles, sometimes very minor! But she has a very specific face that always leaps out at me when I see her. So of course I decided to track down her many frock flick roles! This was no mean feat and involved a LOT of hunting and screencapping.
Nonetheless, there are a few roles I just couldn’t find:
- Vicar Shelley in The Great Kandinsky (1995)
- Phoebe in Children of the New Forest (1998)
- Mrs. Hockey in Housewife, 49 (2005)
- Pamela in Elizabeth David: A Life in Recipes (2006)
Let’s see if you’ve connected the dots on her in all of these others!
Rosemary Bain in Doctor Finlay (1996)
A TV medical drama set in the late 1940s.
Lady Churchill in Mrs. Brown (1997)
I.e. Jane Spencer, Baroness Churchill, companion to Queen Victoria.
Lady Annabelle Wilton in Berkeley Square (1998)
She’s a background character — a society lady — in several episodes of this early 1900s TV series about four nannies working for the upper class in London.
Lady in Waiting in Shakespeare in Love (1998)
I’m pretty sure she just glowers in the background behind Queen Elizabeth I.
Mabel Price in Catherine Cookson’s Tilly Trotter (1999)
A TV adaptation of a romance novel. Appears to be set in the 1850s?
Miss Hornblower in Wives and Daughters (1999)
She is one of the local ladies who socializes with the Gibson family at balls, dinners, and parties.
Aunt Emma in The Railway Children (2000)
An adaptation of a 1906 novel, about a family that falls down on their luck and has to move next to a railway.
Lady Mallinger in Daniel Deronda (2002)
She’s yet another society lady in the background of this 1870s-set miniseries.
Poppea in Rome (2005)
She’s in one scene playing Simon Callow’s characters’ wife, and being shocked by Marc Antony.
Hannah More in Amazing Grace (2006)
She plays a real-life abolitionist and religious writer in this story about the abolition of the slave trade in Britain.
Norah Buckland in Filth: The Mary Whitehouse Story (2008)
Mary Whitehouse campaigned against liberalizing social values in Britain in the late 1960s. Glen plays a background character in this TV movie.
Miss Harris in Margaret Thatcher: The Long Walk to Finchley (2008)
A TV biopic about the British Prime Minister and generally horrible human being. Glen only appears in this one scene, in the 1960s I think.
Mrs. Landrigin in Easy Virtue (2008)
Set in the 1920s this is an adaptation of a Noel Coward play, in which an modern American marries into a stodgy British family. Mrs. Landrigan introduces some kind of performance and then is scandalized by the result.
Mrs. Forbes in Poirot: Cat Among the Pigeons (2008)
Obligatory Agatha Christie appearance in the 1930s detective series.
Mrs. Ruskin in Desperate Romantics (2009)
Mrs. Ruskin was the mother of art critic, John Ruskin, who famously had pubic hair trauma. This TV miniseries is about the pre-Rafaelite brotherhood of artists.
Mrs. Ramsay in Foyle’s War (2010)
Another long running British detective series, this one said in the 1940s.
Mrs. Parsons in Hysteria (2011)
In the early 1880s a British doctor uses the vibrator as a means of treating women’s “hysteria.” Glen plays one of the very happy patients.
Rosamund Greenwood in My Week With Marilyn (2011)
Greenwood was a British actress; she shows up in the table read scene.
Madame Baptistine in Les Misérables (2012)
Glen plays the sister of the bishop who physically and Morley rescues Valjean.
Rose Kennedy in Jackie (2016)
She plays Jackie Kennedy’s mother in this biopic, focusing on the days after JFK’s assassination.
Mother Superior in The Collection (2016)
I have no memory of their being a nun or a convent in this 1950s set couture series.
Mrs. Pope in Quacks (2017)
I assume she’s one of the patients in this Victorian set comedy.
Lady Grenford in Hetty Feather (2018-20)
An adaptation of a novel about a girl who was abandoned as a baby and now works as a servant for an upper-class family.
Abbess in Les Misérables (2019)
She’s back for round two, this time playing the abbess who shelters Valjean.
Ruth Lady Fermoy in The Crown (2020)
OK, so technically she’s in the 1980s portion, playing Princess Diana’s grandmother who trains her up for court life.
Lady Buff-Gore in The Larkins (2021)
A comedy drama series set in 1950s Kent. That’s all I’ve got.
Miss Millicent Higgins in Call the Midwife (2018-)
I haven’t gotten to her appearance in this series yet, but apparently apparently she’s the receptionist for Dr. Turner.
How many of these frock flicks do you recognize Georgie Glen from?
“The Larkins” is set in a fantasy Britain where it’s always strawberry season, the sun always shines and Mum and Dad Larkin can fix just about any problem with love. You’ll either love it or want to puke from the sweetness.
Glen’s Miss Higgins in “Call The Midwife” is a series regular, starchy, ruthlessly efficient, but there’s a heart of gold beating beneath those spinsterly suits.
And Miss Higgins got her own dramatic story at the end of the last season!
and that dramatic story did a lovely job with (subtly) referencing an earlier story of hers from a few season ago- it felt like puzzle pieces falling into place because it was something I’d wondered about at the time.
I don’t want to be a jerk, but Rose Kennedy was Jackie’s mother-in-law. :)