Bio
Zoë Tapper is an English actress best known for her starring role as Ellen Love, on the surface a frivolous good-time girl who has used her beauty, talents and smarts to advance from her chorus girl beginnings to the top of the variety and music hall scene, in the period drama television series Mr Selfridge.
She is also known for portraying Anya Raczynski in Survivors and Mina Harker in Demons.
Plucked straight out of drama school to star as "pretty, witty" Nell Gwynn opposite Rupert Everett and Claire Danes in 2004's Stage Beauty, Tapper often wrapped her day's shooting by going directly to her waitressing shifts.
Her breakout role and her waitressing days now behind her, the graduate of London's Central School of Speech and Drama has since gone on to win plum roles and strong reviews on television, film, and stage.
Tapper, the daughter of a college president mother and a consultant father, desired to act ever since age 11, when she played a fairy at an amateur production of Midsummer Night's Dream. She came by it naturally; her great-grandfather ran a travelling theatre company.
Tapper played the duplicitous widowed temptress in the final episode of Zen. Her numerous other British television credits include a starring turn in Simon Curtis' Twenty Thousand Streets under the Sky, which won her a Royal Television Society award nomination.
On the London stage, Tapper starred opposite Joseph Fiennes in John Osbourne's Epitaph for George Dillon, and for her work in the 2007 production of Shakespeare's Othello at The Globe, The Guardian called her "a Desdemona to die for."
Tapper's big screen credits include 1930s drama These Foolish Things, alongside Hollywood legends Anjelica Huston and Lauren Bacall, and most recently, the romantic comedy Cheerful Weather for the Wedding, with Page Eight's Felicity Jones and Downton Abbey's Elizabeth McGovern.
Tapper is married to fellow actor Oliver Disdale (He Knew He Was Right). The two have a baby daughter, Ava.