Monica Dolan on Rose West, drama school and puppet shows

Monica Dolan won a Bafta in 2011 for portraying Rosemary West in ITV’s Appropriate Adult. Her account of that role starts with repulsion rather than sympathy. Dolan said: “I was repulsed by Rose West, yet I had to work out what made her tick.”

Born in Middlesbrough, North Yorkshire, in 1969, Dolan works across television, film and stage. She trained at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and calls that experience “the joy of finding her people at drama school.” She also looks back on teenage crushes and her toughest roles. The Guildhall years provide the setting for that belonging.

In 2019, she won the Laurence Olivier Award for best supporting actress for the West End production of All About Eve. Her recognition now spans a television performance and a stage performance. That gives the retrospective a clear measure: Dolan has won major awards in two settings, not for one recurring screen persona.

Her television credits include:

• Mr Bates vs the Post Office
• W1A
• Sherwood
• Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa
• Smoggie Queens

Those five credits show the range behind the award-winning profile. They also sharpen the central contrast: Appropriate Adult asks how an actor approaches someone repellent, while the wider résumé asks how that method travels into other work.

Her line about working out what made West “tick” describes the basic mechanism of characterization (building a character through consistent behavior). Personal dislike has to become precise enough for a performer to sustain a character. Understanding, in this formulation, need not mean finding the character likable; it means identifying the behavior that makes the portrayal coherent.

Dolan opens the personal account with a puppet show. She staged it with “a Waldorf Muppet,” putting her head through its “very 1970s-looking hatch” inside a house in Woking, Surrey. A “somewhat neglected Sindy” sat at the side.

She thought the Sindy was “an ice-skating one.” She was “not massively keen on dolls,” but liked that the figure’s legs could move “quite acrobatically.” The warning was that bending a knee too far would make the plastic snap and send a wire through it.

The warning makes the toy’s mechanism concrete. A moving leg depends on plastic and wire; push beyond the safe range and the illusion breaks. Performance, in this small system, depends on controlled movement remaining legible.

Read alongside her remarks on West, the puppet show shifts the profile from résumé to method. It shows performance at a small, mechanical scale. Materials have limits, movement needs control and a scene depends on both.

What does the release schedule mean for viewers?

Dolan stars in Onwards and Sideways, in UK cinemas from 6 November, before its release on BBC iPlayer later in the year. The schedule gives viewers a cinema-first window and a later streaming option.

For Dolan, the film is the next fixed point after a Bafta-winning portrayal of Rosemary West and an Olivier-winning performance in All About Eve. It extends a career built across television, film and stage.