Thandie Newton, OBE

Melanie Thandiwe Newton OBE, Melanie Thandiwe Newton OBE, is a highly successful actress known professionally as Thandie Newton.

She has enjoyed a variety of starring roles, such as the title character in Beloved (1998), Nyah Nordoff-Hall in Mission: Impossible 2 (2000), Christine in Crash (2004) for which she received a BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role, Linda in The Pursuit of Happiness (2006), Condoleezza Rice in W. (2008), Laura Wilson in 2012 (2009) and Val in Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018).

I don't put the pressure on myself to be a very successful movie star. I want to enjoy being an actor and I want to be challenged by the roles I take.

Newton was born in Westminster, London, England, the daughter of Nyasha, a Zimbabwean princess of the Shona people and Nick Newton, an English laboratory technician and artist.

I've been fortunate not to have been pigeonholed by virtue of being mixed-race, of being English and black, and by virtue of working all over the world. I've enjoyed a great degree of variety in the work that I've done. It's been quite unique.

She was brought up in London and Penzance, Cornwall and studied dance at the Tring Park School for the Performing Arts. From 1992 - 1995, she attended Downing College, Cambridge, where she studied social anthropology.

Humans are really interesting. We're so clever, what we do with our brain. How we manage to con ourselves into thinking all sorts of things is really fascinating. By the same token, if we could just convince ourselves of things that would gather us together and powerfully turn things around for the good, that would be awesome. It's doubtful because we're such a fear-based species.

Since 2016, Newton has played the sentient android, the madam Maeve Millay, in the HBO science fiction-western series Westworld, for which she earned a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series and two Critics Choice Awards, as well as Golden Globe Award, Saturn Award and Screen Actors Guild Award nominations.

I can hardly find the words to describe the peace I felt when I was acting. My dysfunctional self could actually plug in to another self, not my own, and it felt so good.

In 2017, she portrayed DCI Roz Huntley in the BBC drama series Line of Duty, for which she earned a nomination for Best Actress at British Academy Television Awards.

The reality is that who you are is who you are right this second, not who you were at any moment in the past because it doesn't exist anymore. It's done. It's over.

Newton was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2019 New Year Honours for services to film and to charity.

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