Maxine Peake’s film career took off as Stephen Hawking’s nurse and second wife in 2014’s The Theory of Everything, in a role that the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw said she approached “with delicacy”. It was a far cry from Twinkle the snarky dinner lady from Victoria Wood’s sitcom Dinnerladies, but not the first time she portrayed a real-life person. She played Myra Hindley in the 2006 ITV drama See No Evil: The Moors Murders, and the titular 19th-century Yorkshire lesbian landowner in the 2010 BBC period drama The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister.
Peake has done a ton more TV: she played Veronica Ball in Channel 4’s Shameless, Martha Costello in BBC One legal drama Silk, and Grace Middleton in BBC One drama series The Village. She’s in that really weird (even for Black Mirror) black and white episode about the robotic dogs. She wrote and starred in a BBC Radio 4 play about Anne Scargill, who was married to Arthur. She used to play rugby for Wigan Ladies. And she pulled on a pair of hose to play Hamlet.
Back on the big screen, the Bolton-born Peake was the lead in 2017’s Funny Cow, where her performance as a northern 70s stand-up was described as “magnificent” by Mark Kermode in the Observer. She’s in Mike Leigh’s historical drama Peterloo as radical working class mother Nellie, and plays Samuel Beckett’s bit on the side in 2023 biopic Dance First.
Now, in Words of War, she takes on the role of journalist and human rights activist Anna Politkovskaya, who was murdered in Russia in 2006. In this very publication Peake described her as “a woman with immense courage and integrity who, despite numerous threats to her life, continued to be a blazing beacon of truth in a time and place where speaking truth was extremely dangerous”. Please get in your questions by 6pm on Tuesday 24 June and we’ll print her answers in Film & Music in July.