Lindsay Vere Duncan (born 7 November 1950) is a Scottish Tony Award-winning actress. She is a noted stage actress, winning the Tony Award for Private Lives.
Duncan was born in Edinburgh, Scotland to a father who served in the army for 21 years. She is married to fellow Scottish actor Hilton McRae. They have one son, Cal McRae, born September 1991.
She studied at London's Central School of Speech and Drama and worked in mostly unheralded theatre roles before graduating to television productions in the 1980s. These productions included On Approval (1982), Reilly, Ace of Spies (1983), Dead Head (1985), and Traffik (1989). On stage she created the role of La Marquise de Merteuil in the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses in Stratford, London and New York.
In the 1990s, she continued to appear in prestigious London stage and screen productions, such as the 1999 TV version of Oliver Twist, in which she portrays Elizabeth Leeford. Duncan also appears in the 1999 film adaptation of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (in dual roles as the heroine's mother and drug-addicted aunt), in the 1997 TV series A History of Tom Jones: A Foundling as Lady Ballaston, in the 1996 film adaptation of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream as Hippolyta and Titania, and in the 1993 TV serial A Year in Provence as the wife of author Peter Mayle.
Most recently Duncan played Servilia Caepionis in the 2005 HBO-BBC series Rome and she starred as Rose Harbinson in Starter for 10. Aged by make-up, she played Lord Longford's wife, Elizabeth, in the award-winning TV film Longford. On the 9th April 2008, it was announced that Duncan was to play Margaret Thatcher in an upcoming BBC film about the former prime minister's final year in power. She will begin filming in the summer.
