Around half our conversation is work-based, the rest is all canine. She has brought along Velma, her four-month-old husky puppy, much to the delight of everyone here. It is a sunny afternoon in Hammersmith, where she has lived for many years, and we meet in a café by the Thames. But I think they’ve given up now,” she says. “They say I ought to do something more glamorous and not wear so many cardigans. Dolan jokes that her nieces have told her off for taking so many “cardigan” roles. She won a Bafta for her portrayal of the serial killer Rose West in 2011, and recently appeared in one of the year’s best dramas, The Thief, His Wife and the Canoe, as Anne Darwin, imprisoned for fraud after helping her husband, John, to fake his own death. But tug at the threads of those characters and the idea of safety soon unravels.
She has a tendency to play characters who wrap themselves up in a sturdy knit women who look harmless, or appear invisible, to the wider world. She has become one of those actors whose involvement in a project all but guarantees quality. M onica Dolan has worn a lot of cardigans over the course of her long acting career.
