Amanda Abbington

Amanda Abbington (born 1972 (age 50)) is an English actress. In a career spanning over thirty years on stage and screen, her most prominent roles include Josie Mardle in Mr Selfridge (2013–2016) and Mary Morstan in Sherlock (2014–2017).

Her other credits include Marilyn Harwood in Dream Team (1999–2000) and Siobhan in the BBC sitcom After You've Gone (2007–2008), as well as appearing in the drama series Cuffs (2015) and Safe (2018). Her stage roles have included God of Carnage (2018), The Son (2019) and The Unfriend (2022–2023).

Early life
Abbington was born in North London, England. An only child, she was brought up in Hertfordshire.

Career
She appeared in the TV series The Bill until 2007, playing various characters. During that time she also appeared in the TV series Wycliffe, Casualty, Dream Team, The Sins, Shades, Doc Martin, Coupling and Teachers. She appeared in the 2005 comedy sketch show Man Stroke Woman, and the 2007–2008 comedy After You've Gone with Nicholas Lyndhurst. She has also appeared in recurring series such as Bernard's Watch and Case Histories.

In 2013, she began appearing in the television series Mr Selfridge as Miss Mardle, alongside Jeremy Piven and Frances O'Connor. In 2014, Abbington appeared as Mary Morstan, the wife of John Watson, played by her then real-life partner Martin Freeman, in the third series of Sherlock the BBC adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. In 2015 she appeared in the BBC TV crime drama series Cuffs.

On stage, Abbington appeared in August 2018 in the role of Annette in God of Carnage at the Theatre Royal, Bath, and in 2019 as the character Anne in Florian Zeller's play The Son, at the Kiln Theatre in Kilburn, London; later that year, the play was transferred to The Duke of York's Theatre in London's West End.

In 2023, Abbington starred in the four-part Channel 5 television series Desperate Measures, and appeared as Dana Beckman in an episode of Inside No. 9.

In August 2023, Abbington was announced as a participant in the twenty-first series of Strictly Come Dancing. She was partnered with Giovanni Pernice but suddenly withdrew from the competition on 23 October 2023, after being absent with illness from the show broadcast three days before. It was later reported that her departure was due to a disagreement over Pernice's training methods and that she requested footage of her time training with Pernice and was seeking legal advice against Pernice; Pernice denied all accusations of wrongdoing.

Personal life
Abbington was the partner of Martin Freeman, whom she met on the set of the film Men Only in 2000. The couple appeared together on screen in productions such as The Debt, The Robinsons, The Good Night and Sherlock. Abbington and Freeman, who have two children, a son and a daughter, lived in Hertfordshire before their separation in 2016.

In May 2022, it was reported that Abbington was engaged to former escapologist and stunt performer Jonathan Goodwin. She and Goodwin had met on Twitter in 2012. The two began dating in late 2021, and Goodwin proposed marriage within 30 minutes of their first date, in Vienna. A year after meeting, he suffered a serious spinal injury in a stunt accident, confining him permanently to a wheelchair.

Bankruptcy
In 2013, Abbington was declared bankrupt over an unpaid £120,000 tax bill. She later commented, "It's being paid off now. I would never want to go through this again. But I'm paying it off [...] It was just me not managing my finances properly. I was putting some money away (to pay tax), but not all of it. I was working one year and not working another year. So I was using the money I'd saved".

Views
In March 2023, Abbington tweeted that a drag queen show for parents and babies that included topless performers was "Not for babies. And if you think it is, there is something fundamentally wrong with you." Following the announcement of her participation in Strictly Come Dancing, some social media users condemned Abbington for her comments, accusing her of transphobia and threatening to boycott the show. Abbington denied she was transphobic and said she had been upset about "a 12-year-old doing something very over-sexualised and I didn't think it was right."