We value Geraldine Somerville for making supporting characters worth attending to, even alongside a performance as forceful as Robbie Coltrane's. Cracker gives her room; Fair Play gives her a telephone and a wedding to discuss.
Fi1m perspective
In Cracker (1993), our attention does not have to stay with Robbie Coltrane's Fitz. Geraldine Somerville's Jane 'Panhandle' Penhaligon helps draw it elsewhere, alongside Lorcan Cranitch's DS Jimmy Beck and Christopher Eccleston's Bilborough. We were grateful for their company, because Fitz's excesses could exhaust our interest if nobody around him seemed worth following. Coltrane's humour keeps Fitz compelling; Somerville and her colleagues make sure he is not the only person who matters.
Penhaligon was her breakthrough, before film roles including Louisa Stockbridge in Gosford Park (2001) and Lily Potter in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (2001). She returned to Lily across the series. Mothers and aristocratic women recur among her roles, with Lady Pressfield in Guy Ritchie's The Gentlemen (2020) another example. That gives her film work a recognisable pattern, though the casting alone tells us little about how much she will be allowed to do.
Fair Play (2023) makes the limits of a supporting role particularly clear. Chloe Domont's thriller is sharp for its first hour, but Somerville, as Emily's mother, is restricted to a phone line and talk of the wedding. Emily is allowed doubt and tact; her mother has one subject, and the script does not give their exchanges much chance to become anything else. We would have liked more of a person at the other end of that call. Our reservation is about what Domont has given her to play, not a failure to make the wedding sufficiently interesting.
Somerville need not compete with the largest performance to be worth our attention. In Cracker, her contribution alongside Cranitch and Eccleston helps prevent Coltrane from becoming the only reason to stay, without diminishing what he does. Start there, with the caveat that the writing sometimes pushes its people harder than it needs to.
Biography
Geraldine Somerville is an Irish actress. She trained at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and began her career in the late 1980s with stage work and early television appearances.
She is known for playing Detective Sergeant Jane Penhaligon in the television series Cracker (1993–1995), for which she received a BAFTA nomination, and for her recurring role as Lily Potter in the Harry Potter film series (2001–2011). Other credits include Gosford Park (2001), My Week with Marilyn (2011) and The Gentlemen (2020). In 2023 she appeared as Emily's mother in the film Fair Play.
