Katherine Jane Parkinson (born 9 March 1978) is an English actress. She appeared in Channel 4's The IT Crowd comedy series as Jen Barber, for which she received a British Comedy Best TV Actress Award in 2009 and 2014, and was nominated twice for the BAFTA Television Award for Best Female Comedy Performance, winning in 2014. Parkinson studied at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, and has appeared on stage in the plays The Seagull (2007), Cock (2009), and Home, I'm Darling (2018), for which she was nominated for the Olivier Award for Best Actress in a Play.
Parkinson was also a main cast member of the series Doc Martin for three series (2005–2009). She co-starred in all three series of Humans, a science-fiction drama on AMC/Channel 4, which aired from 2015 until 2018. She has also appeared in the films The Boat That Rocked (2009) and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (2018).
Parkinson was born on 9 March 1978 in Hounslow, London, to an English mother and Northern Irish father, the historian Alan Parkinson. She grew up in Tolworth and Surbiton, and studied at Tiffin Girls' School before reading classics at St Hilda's College, Oxford. She then studied at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, although she left before graduating in order to star in the play The Age of Consent, which premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2001.

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