The actress Helen McCrory has been cast as Narcissa Malfoy in the Harry Potter series.
The daughter of a diplomat, McCrory was born in London but raised in a number of international locations. She was educated Queenswood, a boarding school in Hertfordshire, and spent a year living in Italy before attending drama school.
She enjoyed a lengthy relationship with actor Rufus Sewell whom she started dating when they were both appearing in Pride and Prejudice in Manchester. She is married to the actor Damian Lewis; they have a daughter, Manon (born September, 2006), and a son, Gulliver (born November, 2007). They live in Tufnell Park.
In 2002 she was nominated for a London Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Actress (for playing Elena in Chekhov's Uncle Vanya at the Donmar Warehouse). She was nominated for a 2006 Laurence Olivier Theatre Award for her most recent stage work, starring as Rosalind in As You Like It in London's West End.
Her television work includes Lucky Jim (2003), Charles II: The Power and The Passion (2003) as Barbara Villiers, Countess of Castlemaine, as well as the title roles in an ITV miniseries Anna Karenina (2000) and in Carla (2003).
She has appeared in supporting roles in such films as Interview with a Vampire (1994), Dad Savage (1998), Charlotte Gray (2001), and The Count of Monte Cristo (2002), Casanova (2005), and The Queen (in which she portrayed Cherie Blair; 2006).
She will next be seen in Bayley Walsh's Flashbacks of a Fool with Daniel Craig, and a modernised TV adaptation of Frankenstein's Monster. In April 2008, she will appear in a production of Ibsen's Rosmersholm at the Almeida Theatre.
Though her first pregnancy forced her to pull out of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007), in which she had been cast as Bellatrix Lestrange, McCrory will portray Lestrange's sister Narcissa Malfoy in the upcoming Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince movie set to be released in November 2008.
Source: Wikipedia