Alex Kingston

Alexandra Kingston is an English actress with a posh accent and her self-deprecating attitude most widely known for her role as Dr. Elizabeth Corday on the NBC medical drama ER.

Kingston was born (11th March, 1963) and raised in Epsom, Surrey. She is the eldest of three daughters of a butcher and his German wife. Her mother's younger brother is actor Walter Renneisen. She was inspired to pursue acting by one of her teachers at her all-girls grammar school Rosebery School for Girls. She later completed a two-year programme at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and went on to join the prestigious Royal Shakespeare Company.

Alex Kingston has appeared in a number of British produced television dramas, including Grange Hill, Crocodile Shoes, Moll Flanders, The Knock and a guest role on The Bill. In 1997, Kingston gained American television fame after being cast on the medical drama ER at the start of the fourth season. Her character Elizabeth Corday was a British surgeon arriving from England. Alex Kingston played this role for just over seven seasons until leaving in 2004, four episodes into Season 11. In 2009, Kingston returned to ER for two episodes (including the series finale) during its 15th and final season. Her film credits include The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989), A Pin for the Butterfly (1994), Croupier (1998), Boudica (Warrior Queen in the USA) (2003) in which she played Boudica, and Sweet Land (2005). In 2006, she starred opposite Christian Slater in the West End (London, England) production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, playing Nurse Ratched to Slater's Randle Patrick McMurphy (characters famously portrayed by Louise Fletcher and Jack Nicholson in the 1975 Oscar-winning film of the same name).

In November 2005, Alex Kingston appeared in the long-running drama series Without A Trace (season 4 episode 6). She played the distressed wife of a wealthy American man who is snatched by a Mexican street gang on the last night of their honeymoon. Later, she turns out to be the person who masterminded the kidnapping.

Kingston met actor Ralph Fiennes while both were students at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. They were together for ten years before marrying in 1993. They divorced in 1997, after Fiennes left her for actress Francesca Annis, 18 years his senior. Kingston married her second husband, German writer and freelance journalist Florian Haertel, in 1998. They met the previous year on a blind date arranged by friends. They have a daughter together, Salome Violetta, born on 28 March 2001.