Julie Graham

In the family scenes of This City Is Ours (2025), Julie Graham’s Elaine Phelan is worth attending to even when the criminal business around her feels familiar. Alongside Sean Bean’s Ronnie Phelan, she gives us a reason to take this family seriously. Bean supplies the threat; Graham gives the domestic exchanges a weight the gangster plotting does not always earn. We cared more than we expected to about these scenes, because her authority made Elaine matter before the writing had fully justified our attention. That is a substantial contribution to a good, uneven crime drama.

She has not spent her whole career playing women like Elaine. Her breakthrough as Megan Hartnoll in At Home with the Braithwaites (2000) was followed by Mary Gilcrest, the romantic co-lead opposite Martin Clunes in William and Mary (2003). Later came the recurring authority figure Rhona Kelly in Shetland (2013–2022) and Sheron Dawson in the comedy Benidorm (2016–2018). These programmes ask different things of an actor, and the comedy is worth remembering when considering her frequent casting as tough women and matriarchs. We would rather see that experience put to use than have every new part ask her to be formidable in the same way.

The later matriarch parts, including The Hardacres (2024), suit her, but we would be wary of treating ‘tough woman’ as a sufficient character description. A writer still has to give that woman something worth doing, and a reason to do it, rather than rely on Graham to make her important by turning up. In This City Is Ours, Graham’s convincing work makes the weaker stretches of Butchard’s writing more conspicuous. That is the limit of this particular strength: she can persuade us to take Elaine seriously, but cannot make every surrounding betrayal less routine. Start there for Graham and Bean, with some patience for the criminal business.