Anne-Marie Duff is an English actress born on October 8, 1970, in Southall, London. Her parents, Brendan and Mary Doherty, are from Donegal, Ireland. Her father worked as a painter and decorator, while her mother worked in a shoe shop.
Duff gained recognition for her roles in The Magdalene Sisters (2002) and Shameless (2004),where she met her future husband, James McAvoy. She played Queen Elizabeth I in The Virgin Queen (2005) alongside Tom Hardy.
In Nowhere Boy (2009),Duff portrayed John Lennon's mother, Julia, earning a British Independent Film Award for Best Supporting Actress. She played Violet Miller in Suffragette (2015),a working-class woman who introduces Maud Watts to the fight for women's rights in east London. Duff described Violet as "extraordinary, she's a firebrand - a tornado that comes into Maud's life and changes it forever. I found her thrilling."
In 2017, Duff voiced the character Hyzenthlay in a new BBC animated miniseries of Watership Down. She has also taken on numerous theatre roles, including Joan of Arc in George Bernard Shaw's "Saint Joan" in 2007 and Alma Rattenbury in Terence Rattigan's "Cause Célèbre" at The Old Vic, London in 2011.
Duff has been married to McAvoy since November 11, 2006, and they have one child, a son named Brendan after her father. However, on May 13, 2016, the couple announced their decision to divorce.
