Sophie Ward

Sophie Anna Ward (born 30 December 1964) is a British stage and screen actress, and a writer of non-fiction and fiction from London. As an actress, she played Jocelyn Sheffield in The Nanny; she also played Elizabeth Hardy, the female lead in Barry Levinson's Young Sherlock Holmes (1985), and in other feature film roles including in Cary Joji Fukunaga's period drama Jane Eyre (2011), and Jane Sanger's horror feature Swiperight (2020). In 1982 she had a role in the Academy Award-winning short film A Shocking Accident. On television she played Dr Helen Trent in the ITV police period drama series Heartbeat from 2004 to 2006, Sophia Byrne in the series Holby City from 2008 to 2010, Lady Ellen Hoxley in the series Land Girls from 2009 to 2011, and Lady Verinder in the mini-series The Moonstone (2016). She has had a variety of other roles on stage and in short and feature films.

Ward returned to higher education, earning a PhD degree from Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2019, in English and Comparative Literature, focusing on the intersection between literature and philosophy, including the use of narrative and thought experiments in philosophy, the philosophy of mind in particular. She has written for The Guardian, The Times and The Spectator, won the 2018 Royal Academy Pin Drop Award for her short story "Sunbed", and had her first novel, Love and Other Thought Experiments (2020), longlisted for both the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Booker Prize in its publication year. She and her wife, Korean-American poet and writer Rena Brannan, divide their time between the United Kingdom and the United States.