Sophie Winkleman (born 5 August 1980) is an English actress.
Winkleman is best known for her role as Big Suze, the on/off girlfriend of Jeremy (Robert Webb) in the offbeat Channel 4 sitcom Peep Show. She is also known for her starring role as one of the main characters, Princess Eleanor in the British TV drama The Palace. She is the half-sister of TV presenter Claudia Winkleman.
Sophie was educated at City of London School for Girls and University of Cambridge, where she read English literature at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. She toured Britain for four months in 2001 with the university's famed dramatic society Cambridge Footlights in Far Too Happy, a comic revue she co-wrote and performed in. For the first time in twenty years, the Footlights received a Perrier award nomination. Sophie is also a member of the National Youth Theatre.
Aside from Peep Show, Winkleman's other TV credits include lead roles in the Warner Bros show Chasing Alice, the Fox series Keen Eddie, ITV police dramas Lewis (a spin-off of Inspector Morse) and Poirot, BBC TV crime series Dalziel and Pascoe and Waking the Dead, (2002: Episode - Thin Air), the television adaptation of Zadie Smith's White Teeth and the 2007 More4 political satire The Trial of Tony Blair. Sophie also appeared in several sketches in BBC One sketch series Ruddy Hell! It's Harry and Paul (2007), with Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse. She will soon be seen in Channel 4's new comedy 'Plus One'.
In the later months of 2007 she filmed the lead role of Princess Eleanor in Company Pictures' eight-part television series The Palace, which was broadcast on ITV from January–March 2008. In August 2008, she filmed the leading guest role in the first episode of Kingdom's third series, due to be broadcast in 2009.
Winkleman's stage career includes a spell at the Royal Shakespeare Company where she played Veronique in Laurence Boswell's adaptation of Beauty and the Beast and a summer in Bath with the Peter Hall Company playing a variety of roles including Archangela in Gallileo's Daughter, a new play by Timberlake Wertenbeker, Violet in George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman and Charlotte in Don Juan directed by Thea Sharrock. Her numerous roles whilst at Cambridge include the Bride in Lorca's 'Blood Wedding' which toured the amphitheatres of Greece, Dockdaisy in Bertolt Brecht's 'The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui' and Kate in Alan Ayckbourne's 'Confusions.'
Shattered, directed by Rick Larkin, premiered at the Galway Film Fleadh in 2007, in which Winkleman played the lead role of Rachel. She also played the lead role in "Love Live Long" written and directed by Mike Figgis. Set amid the 2007 Gumball Rally car race, Winkleman portrays a fragile girl toying with suicide. Winkleman also played the comic role of Debbie Levine in Pathe's 2004 romantic comedy Suzie Gold. She also appeared as the older Susan at the end of the Disney film The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the WardrobeHer short film roles include the leads in 'Seared' and 'The Lost Domain', a cinematic take on Alan-Fournier's 'Le Grand Meaulnes'..
Winkleman is also a regular in BBC Radio 4 comedy and drama. She is among the cast of comedy programmes such as Marcus Brigstocke's Giles Wemmbley-Hogg Goes Off. In 2007 she played Anna Freud Tune in Radio 4 play "Doctor Freud Will See You Now, Mrs Hitler", by Lawrence Marks and Maurice Gran. It portrays dictator Adolf Hitler as a patient receiving therapy. She will shortly be recording the lead role of Sasha in 'Von Ribbentrop's Watch', a historical drama for Radio 4.
