Miriam Margolyes OBE (/ˈmɑːrɡəliːz/ MAR-gə-leez; born 18 May 1941) is a British-Australian actress. She has gained prominence as a character actor on stage and screen. She received a BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for her role in Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence (1993) and portrayed Professor Sprout in the Harry Potter film series (2002–2011). Margolyes was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2002 New Year Honours for Services to Drama.
After starting her career in theatre, she made her film acting debut in the British comedy A Nice Girl Like Me (1969). She has since appeared in Yentl (1983), Little Shop of Horrors (1986), Little Dorrit (1988), Romeo Juliet (1996), and Being Julia (2004). She is also known for her voice roles in Babe (1995), James and the Giant Peach (1996), Mulan (1998), Happy Feet (2006), Flushed Away (2006), and Early Man (2018).
Margolyes is also known for her television appearances including Kizzy, Blackadder, Cold Comfort Farm (1995), Vanity Fair (1998), and The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (2004). She is also known for her recurring roles as Prudence Stanley in Australian series Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries (2012-2015) and Sister Mildred in the BBC series Call the Midwife (2018-2021). She has starred in productions in both the United Kingdom and Australia, including her 1989 one-woman show Dickens' Women and the Australian premiere of the 2013 play, I'll Eat You Last.
Margolyes has spent many years dividing her time between the United Kingdom, Australia and Italy. She became an Australian citizen in 2013. She has also written three books, Dickens' Women (2012), her autobiography This Much is True (2021) and Oh Miriam (2023)
Early life
Margolyes was born in Oxford on 18 May 1941, the only child of Joseph Margolyes (1899–1995), a Scottish physician and general practitioner from the Gorbals area of Glasgow, and property-developer Ruth (née Sandeman; 1905–1974), daughter of a second-hand furniture dealer and auctioneer at Kirkdale, Liverpool, who later relocated to London. The maternal family surname changed from Sandeman to Walters before Margolyes' birth. She grew up in a Jewish family. Her ancestors moved to the UK from Belarus and Poland. Her maternal great-grandfather, Symeon Sandmann, was born in the Polish town of Margonin, which Margolyes visited in 2013. Her grandfather Margolyes was born in a small shtetl called Amdur (now Indura) in Belarus, which at that time was part of the Russian Empire.
Margolyes attended Oxford High School and Newnham College, Cambridge, where she read English. There, in her 20s, she began acting and appeared in productions by the Cambridge Footlights. She represented Newnham College in the first series of University Challenge, where she may have been one of the first people to say "fuck" on British television; she claims to have used the word in frustration on the show in 1963.
