Frances O’Connor

Born in Wantage, raised in Perth

Frances O’Connor was born in Wantage on 12 June 1967. When she was two her family emigrated to Perth, Western Australia, where she grew up. She went to Mercedes College in Perth, took a degree at Curtin University and trained as an actor at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts. Her Wantage link is her birth; she did not grow up in the town, and her career has been built in Australia, Britain and the United States.

Film and television

After early work on Australian stage and screen, she came to international attention as Fanny Price in Patricia Rozema’s Mansfield Park (1999). She played opposite Brendan Fraser in Bedazzled (2000), was Monica Swinton, the mother who adopts a robot boy, in Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), and Gwendolen Fairfax in Oliver Parker’s The Importance of Being Earnest (2002). Later films include The Conjuring 2 (2016), in which she played Peggy Hodgson.

On television she played Rose Selfridge in Mr Selfridge and Emily Hughes, the mother of a missing child, in the BBC drama The Missing (2014), for which she received a Golden Globe nomination. She won the Australian Film Institute award for best actress for Blessed (2009).

Writer and director

In 2022 she wrote and directed Emily, an imagined portrait of the novelist Emily Brontë starring Emma Mackey. It was her first feature film as a director. She has continued to act alongside directing, including the role of Francoise Galpin in the second series of the Netflix drama Wednesday (2025).

Locally

There is no memorial or plaque to her in Wantage. Her entry here records a Wantage birth rather than a continuing connection with the town.