Kara Tointon

Kara Tointon is an English actress who grew up in Leigh, Essex, and began performing as a child, taking speech and drama lessons and winning her first paid work as a dancer in a Snow White pantomime at eleven. She appeared in EastEnders in 1994 as a school friend of Sonia, later took the part of student Pauline Young in the Channel 4 drama Teachers, and played Dawn Swann in EastEnders for four years. She won the BBC competition Strictly Come Dancing in 2010 and played Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion in the West End in 2011, followed by stage roles in Absent Friends and Relatively Speaking. On television she was Rosalie Selfridge in Mr Selfridge and Maria in The Sound of Music Live, and she appeared in the film Last Passenger (2013).