Justine Waddell (born 4 November 1976) is a South African-born British film actress, best known for her roles in the 2006 film The Fall and 2005 film Chaos as well as Tess in the 1998 LWT adaptation of Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Estella in the 1999 BBC adaptation of Great Expectations.

Biography

Early life
Waddell was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. Her father, Gordon Waddell (1937–2012), was a Scottish rugby union player who captained the Scottish national team and played for the British and Irish Lions. He later became a Progressive Party Member of Parliament in South Africa, and a director of Anglo American PLC. Her grandfather, Herbert Waddell (1902–1988), also played rugby for Scotland and the Lions. Waddell moved with her family to Scotland when she was eleven. Four years later they moved to London. Waddell is the only member of her family to take up a career in acting. She read Social and Political Science at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, which allowed her to take time off from her studies to pursue her career.


Career
Waddell has divided her work between stage and screen. Amongst her roles to date have been her performance as Sasha opposite Ralph Fiennes and Bill Paterson in the Almeida Theatre's London production of Ivanov (1997), Countess Nordston in Anna Karenina (1997), Tess in Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1998), Julia Bertram in Mansfield Park (1999), Estella in Great Expectations, Nina in a Royal Shakespeare Company production of The Seagull by Anton Chekhov (2000), for which she was nominated for an Ian Charleson award and Molly Gibson in the television mini series Wives and Daughters for which she won a Broadcasting Press Guild Best Actress award. She played Mary Heller in the American film, Dracula 2000. In 2002 she starred in The One and Only.She won a Prism Award for Best Actress for her portrayal of Natalie Wood in The Mystery of Natalie Wood, a 2004 TV movie directed by Peter Bogdanovich.In 2006 Waddell starred alongside Jason Statham and Ryan Phillipe in Chaos. During the same year, she co-starred with Lee Pace in Tarsem Singh’s The Fall. In 2011 Waddell had a starring role in Mishen, which is a Russian science fiction film directed by Alexander Zeldovich and written by Vladimir Sorokin. For her role in the film, she learned the Russian language from scratch. Mishen had its world premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival and then a gala premiere at the Moscow International Film Festival. In 2014, Waddell was on the jury of the Festival of European Film "Voices" in Vologda, Russia.