CHARLOTTE RILEY

One year after graduating from LAMDA and the buzz around Charlotte Riley is growing. She has just finished Stephan Elliott's adaptation of Noel Coward's Easy Virtue in which she plays the main character's down-to-earth childhood sweetheart. Riley may have felt intimidated before starting the job - hardly surprising given a cast including Ben Barnes, Jessica Biel, Kristin Scott Thomas and Colin Firth - but her fears were unfounded. 'We were told by our teachers at drama school never to bother anyone with questions but I found the opposite, everyone was full of advice,' she says. 'Working with actors of that calibre really made me step up my game.' She now has the biggest challenge of her career so far in Coky Giedroyc's Wuthering Heights for ITV, in which she stars as Catherine Earnshaw opposite Tom Hardy's Heathcliffe. 'I wanted to do a period piece this year and playing Cathy is a dream come true,' says Riley.