In her last appearance on primetime television, Anna Maxwell Martin drew a spontaneous combustion of hate on social media. Viewers couldn’t stand her – or at least, they loathed Patricia Carmichael, the monstrous detective chief superintendent making her police colleagues’ life hell in BBC One’s Line of Duty. When the show, which concludes its sixth series on Sunday night, began trending on Twitter, enthusiasts outdid one another compiling memes on why Carmichael was so objectionable.
She was, to paraphrase the show’s devotees, the Monday morning alarm in human form. The physical embodiment of the teeth-grinding, passive aggression of the sentence “as per my last email”. Thousands agreed with one fan who noted that “the way we all hate Patricia Carmichael so much really is a testament to how insanely talented Anna Maxwell Martin is”.
Maxwell Martin, 43, had enjoyed more than 15 years of critical acclaim as a stage and television actress prior to joining the BBC’s twisty police procedural. Creator Jed Mercurio said he was “delighted and flattered that an actor of Anna Maxwell Martin’s status agreed to play this pivotal role”. Before it, every now and again she might have been stopped in the supermarket. As she told the Observer: “I don’t get offended if someone comes up to me in Waitrose – for some reason, it’s Waitrose in particular – and says: ‘Oh, I saw you in Cabaret. I hated it. You weren’t very good.’”
It was a level of fame Maxwell Martin was comfortable with, able to pootle around the north London neighbourhood where she then lived with little fuss. Now, with more than 10 million Brits tuning in to Line of Duty, she faces being snapped by paparazzi if she’s out in London and has been subject to a level of media scrutiny she finds baffling. Last week the Sun pored over every inch of Maxwell Martin’s Instagram account, , which she created less than a year ago, for an article analysing the interior decor of her home in Hertfordshire.
“She loves how much people love the show,” one colleague said. “She just hates the press circus that seems to come with it.”
Maxwell Martin grew up in Beverley, East Yorkshire. Her parents were scientists, her father, Ivan, the director of a pharmaceutical company and her mother, Rosalind, a researcher. “My parents had no idea where I came from, but they let me get on with it,” she told the Mail on Sunday last year. “I’d dress up in little outfits and I’d get to sing solos. I remember dressing as a pearly queen for one performance, but Whitney [Houston] was my idol.”
She described herself as a drama queen from a young age, explaining in one interview that as a child she was “a bit strung out. I used to get completely hyperactive and then completely depressed. I’m much more level now”.
By the time she was 11, Maxwell Martin had joined an after-school drama club and decided that was it for her: she was going to become an actress.
Emotionally “not ready” for drama school at 18, she read history at Liverpool University before going to Lamda [London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art]. On graduating in 2001 she made her professional stage debut at London’s Donmar Warehouse in a production of Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes. It was the only performance her father saw her in before he died that year.
By 2004 Maxwell Martin was earning rave reviews playing 12-year-old Lyra in the National Theatre’s production of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. She “carries much of the show on her slim shoulders,” noted the Guardian’s Michael Billington, while the Telegraph crisply observed: “She’s not a beauty to rival Keira Knightley, but her face is always interesting to watch.”
Thankfully, Maxwell Martin didn’t pay too much attention to industry cattiness and declared herself “strangely un-neurotic for an actress”.
“I wasn’t confident about my looks because I wasn’t classically pretty like a lot of actresses when I was growing up,” she said last year. “But I never doubted I could act. I wasn’t arrogant, just totally sure I was doing the right thing.”
His Dark Materials saw Maxwell Martin nominated for her first Olivier and catapulted her into a TV and theatre career that has included winning two best actress Baftas (for the BBC’s Bleak House and Channel 4’s Poppy Shakespeare) and a steady sweep of praise for her work on stage. It was around the same time that she and Roger Michell became a couple, after he cast her in another play at the National.
“When I met him he felt like my person,” Maxwell Martin said. “I groomed him to fall in love with me,” she joked. The director of Venus, Le Week-End and Notting Hill (a film Martin once described as “arse-achingly middle class”) was 21 years her senior and had two children with his first wife. The couple married and had two daughters together, Maggie, 11, and eight-year-old Nancy, before announcing their separation last spring. “I haven’t really spoken about it because it isn’t fair on all the people involved,” she said at the time. “There are four children to think about. It’s taken an enormous amount of time, but we are all getting through it in a healthy way … you get on with life. We talk all the time.”
Career-wise, Maxwell Martin has been on an incremental ascent. A brief foray to Los Angeles didn’t work out – she reportedly lost out to Carey Mulligan for a role in the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis – although she is considering trying again next year “for a bit”, despite being wary of the schmooze Hollywood requires.
“I really have a lot of confidence in myself as an actor, but I don’t necessarily have that same confidence in a room full of people, networking at a party,” she told the Observer in 2018. “If someone said, ‘Hey, do you want to come to this really cool party?’ I would probably have said, ‘No, I have cystitis, sorry’.”
Not that it seemed to affect her work at home. The Guardian once noted that the very appearance of Maxwell Martin in a production “tends to be a signal of quality British television”. And in 2016, after a serious run of period dramas and literary adaptations, Maxwell Martin signed up to her first comedic role in Motherland.
The BBC sitcom by Sharon Horgan and Holly Walsh takes a savage swipe at school gate life and has built cult status, being caustic and funny enough for viewers with or without kids. Maxwell Martin was nominated for another Bafta – for comedy this time – playing the role of harried and scowling working mum Julia. Series three returns on 10 May.
Horgan said she had hoped for an actor “who made you laugh but also made you panic inside. And Anna does that. She’s one of those actors who’s so naturally gifted she can just switch it on and off. She’s also a little bit nuts, which always helps”.
One interviewer recalled that “far from [being] the serious actor type, she reminds me of a slightly dotty relative, barrelling along happily, amused by most of what’s going on around her”.
It’s a recurring theme. Maxwell Martin cackled her way through ITV’s This Morning with Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby last Monday and caused Zoe Ball to honk with laughter when she appeared on Radio 2’s Breakfast show.
Often giggling on set and in her interviews, Maxwell Martin insists she’s nothing at all like the terrifying and tight-lipped characters she often plays. “I’m absolutely not like Julia”, she told the Mail on Sunday. “She’s a horrible, self-centred human being.” Maxwell Martin, on the other hand, has kept the same tight circle of friends since school and her days at university in Liverpool. She once described her marriage as an oddball coupling. “He’s a real intellectual and I’m a silly performing seal,” she told an interviewer.
One friend, the actress Lucy Cohu, told the Independent that Maxwell Martin’s success was partly the result of the fact that she retained a sense of normality, and an ability not to take herself too seriously.
“Anna is very rare in this industry” said Cohu. “She is without artifice as a person, and that is reflected in her acting.”