Louise Lombard

Louise Lombard lived and breathed the fine arts from an early age, and projected extreme versatility in many arenas. A trained dancer and actress from early childhood, Lombard graduated to television commercials by age 14, and subsequently delved into dramatic roles. Lombard evinced a remarkable predilection for emotionally and psychologically challenging evocations, such as that of a heroin addict in a PSA directed by Jon Amiel (Copycat). After gracing the BBC series Casualty and Bergerac, the ITV show Capital City, and the ITV telemovies Catherine Cookson's A Black Velvet Gown, and Perfect Scoundrels: Sweeter Than Wine, Lombard broke through to national fame in 1991, with the lead role of Evangeline Eliott in the three-season House of Eliott series on the BBC. The story concerns two sisters who travel the road from extreme poverty to wealth as proprietors of the most successful dressmaking business in all of England.

For the remainder of the 1990s, Lombard sought out a series of highly individualized and intelligent projects, including Elizabeth Gill's 1997 ensemble drama Gold in the Streets (as the girlfriend of an illegal Irish immigrant) and the ITV series Bodyguards (as one of the toughs of the title). After a brief tenure as a literature student at Cambridge University (as well as studying photography and print work at St. Martin's College), Lombard spent the first decade of the new millennium branching out into more internationally oriented roles, including insurance investigator Ellen Brachman in the Dutch movie Claim (2000), and the part of Kath in My Kingdom (2001), a highly modernized adaptation of Shakespeare's King Lear. American viewers, however, will most closely associate Lombard with the romantic lead of Lady Anne Davenport in the Viggo Mortensen period adventure saga Hidalgo (2004), and the role of Dr. Harriet Fellows, a physician who assists crash survivor Alec Baldwin, in the TNT telemovie Second Nature (2003).

~ Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide