RISING STAR: Florence Pugh

It’s all happening for the 22-year-old actress (The Little Drummer Girl, 9.30pm, BBC1), who, in the space of just a few years, has emerged as a big talent and one to keep watching…

Born and raised in Oxfordshire, Florence (Flossie to her friends) has an elder brother, Toby Sebastian, who is also an actor, best-known for playing Trystane Martell in Game Of Thrones. Her first screen role was in the drama

The Falling (2014), alongside Maisie Williams. She auditioned while she was doing her A levels, and humbly describes getting cast as a bit of a ‘fluke’.

She had a recurring role in the first series of Marcella (2016) before her breakout in acclaimed British indie

Lady Macbeth, based not on the Shakespeare character, but on a lesser-known 19th-century novella by Nikolai Leskov; filming took place when she was just 19 years old. Florence won a British Independence Film Award for Best Actress for the role, which sees her character, Katherine, strongly rejecting the submissive role society and her husband demand of her. Earlier this year, she starred as Cordelia in a BBC adaptation of King Lear, with Anthony Hopkins. Historical drama Outlaw King, in which she plays Elizabeth de Burgh, queen consort of Chris Pine’s Robert the Bruce, is currently available on Netflix. Watch out for her next year in

Greta Gerwig’s Little Women (2019), Hereditary director Ari Aster’s new horror Midsommar, and the comedy Fighting With My Family, in which she stars as an aspiring professional wrestler who gets to knock about with Dwayne Johnson.