Samantha Bond

Samantha Jane Bond (born 27 November 1961) is an English actress, who is best known for playing Miss Moneypenny in four James Bond films during the Pierce Brosnan years, and for her role on Downton Abbey as the wealthy widow Lady Rosamund Painswick, sister of Robert Crawley, the Earl of Grantham. She is also known for originating the role of "Miz Liz" Probert in the Rumpole of the Bailey series. Bond is a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company. In her television career, she is known for her role as "Auntie Angela" in the sitcom Outnumbered and the villain Mrs Wormwood in the CBBC Doctor Who spin-off, The Sarah Jane Adventures. Samantha Bond is the daughter of actor Philip Bond and TV producer Pat Sandys, and is the sister of the actress Abigail Bond and the journalist Matthew Bond. Bond's paternal grandparents were Welsh. She was brought up in London, in homes in Barnes and St Margarets. She attended the Godolphin and Latymer School, and studied acting at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. Bond's first acting role came as a student at age 21, in the original stage production of Daisy Pulls It Off, Denise Deegan's play about a girls school, which opened at Southampton's Nuffield Theatre in 1983. Her earliest television roles took place the same year: she played Maria Rushworth (née Bertram) in the BBC mini-series adaptation of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, and Rumpole's pupil in chambers "Miz Liz" Probert in the fourth series of Rumpole of the Bailey. In 1985, she appeared as Julia Simmons in the BBC's televised adaptation of Agatha Christie's crime novel A Murder is Announced, part of the Miss Marple series.