Victoria Plucknett
Actress from Swansea
Victoria Plucknett is a Welsh actress born in 1953 in Swansea. She built a career in British television spanning drama, comedy and children's programming, becoming a familiar face across several decades of screen work.
Plucknett's most widely remembered English-language role came in the BBC period drama "The Duchess of Duke Street", in which she played the recurring character Mary across 26 episodes between 1976 and 1977. Earlier in her career she appeared as WPC Beck in the police drama "Z-Cars" and took the role of Phebe in the BBC Television Shakespeare production of "As You Like It" in 1978. Other credits from this period include "Kilvert's Diary" (1977) and "How Green Was My Valley" (1975).
Plucknett is also well known to Welsh-speaking audiences for her long-running role as Diane Ashurst in the S4C soap opera "Pobol y Cwm", a part she played from 1998 to 2020, as well as earlier Welsh-language work including "Y Palmant Aur" and "The Sherman Plays".
Born and raised in Swansea, Plucknett has bridged English and Welsh-language television across her career, making her one of the more enduring performers to have come out of South Wales.