Phyllis Logan

Logan was educated at Johnstone High School in Johnstone, Renfrewshire, Scotland.

After graduation, she joined the Dundee Repertory Theatre.She left in 1979 to work on stage in Edinburgh. She also worked regularly on Scottish television. On the BBC Scotland production, The White Bird Passes, she first met writer-director Michael Radford. In his first feature film, Another Time, Another Place in 1982, he cast her in the leading role of Janie, for which she won a Gold Award for Best Actress at the Taormina Film Festival and the Evening Standard Award for Best Actress in 1983 and the BAFTA Award for the Most Outstanding Newcomer to Film in 1984.

She has also had parts in the 1996 Mike Leigh film Secrets & Lies and a regular role as Lady Jane Felsham in the television series Lovejoy. Logan provided the broadcast voice of Ingsoc in the film version of Nineteen Eighty-Four and the Loch Ness Monster in the cartoon Freddie as F.R.O.7. She was in the radio series Coming Alive and Baggage. She played Inspector Frost's love interest in If Dogs Run Free, the last story in the A Touch of Frost series, and marries him. She has played Mrs Hughes, the housekeeper, in all three seasons to date of the period drama Downton Abbey.

Logan has a home in Brighton where she lives with her husband, actor Kevin McNally, and they have a son, David, born June 1996.