Pride and Prejudice featured six young actresses who had acting parents, some of them well-known names. One of these was Lucy Briers, whose father, Richard, is one of Britain’s best-loved television stars. In the mid-seventies he headlined a popular sitcom called The Good Life in which he played a suburbanite on a back-to-the-land kick. Young Lucy couldn’t understand why her school friends didn’t realize that her father was acting. “I was constantly asked daft questions such as, ‘How many goats do you have in your garden?’” she recalled years later. “To which I would reply wearily, ‘We don’t have any goats, we live in Chiswick.’ At seven I assumed they were all terribly stupid not to understand the concept of TV.”

	Unnatural Causes, with Bill Nighy

Lucy’s mother, Ann Davies, is also an actress, although her career has been much less successful than her husband’s and she spent much of Lucy’s youth at home with her two daughters (Lucy has an older sister, Kate, who at one point spent some time as a stage manager but is now out of the theater). Lucy, born on August 19, 1967, grew up in Chiswick, west London, and attended St. Paul’s Girls’ School in Hammersmith. While she did sculpture, music, and painting as a child, and once had an ambition to become an underwater sea explorer, she decided at the age of ten to become an actress. She had always loved being taken to the theater, and was convinced that she was born with the need to act. Nevertheless, her parents tried to dissuade her. “I think the reason [they] discouraged me was simply because it is a tough business for women, in some ways it’s harder for women than it is for men: there are fewer parts and there’s this whole age thing with women,” she has said. But when they realized that Lucy was determined, they became very supportive. The three of them even appeared together in 1999 in the play Spike, which was written for Lucy by her friend Simon Day.

Henry VI Pts. 1 & 2, with Paterson Joseph

After graduating from Lancaster University in 1988, Briers enrolled in the Bristol Old Vic Theater School, where her classmates included Helen Baxendale, Jonathan Cake, Raymond Coulthard, the playwright Day, and Olivia Williams. After graduating in 1991 she found work easily, although she resisted being typecast as a comedian like her father and went in instead for serious drama. “I love the theater, theater is my home — although TV is really nice for the money,” she said in a 2004 interview. “TV’s a wonderful medium but you don’t get as involved — you can’t, because there’s no time for rehearsal, you’ve got to do it in two or three takes. Pride and Prejudice was different because we did have time for rehearsal before we started shooting and we were all living in the same place for five months, so that did become like a repertory company, and that was wonderful.”

	Musik, with Mariah Gale

TV also offers recognition that can last long past the initial air date. Briers’s 1992 guest shot on the cult sci-fi sitcom Red Dwarf generates fan mail for her even today, and the popularity of Pride and Prejudice inspired a 2001 radio play called Mary, Mary, in which she reprised her role of Mary Bennet. The play retold the story of Pride and Prejudice from Mary’s myopic viewpoint, in which she imagines that all the men, Darcy and Bingley included, were in love with her.

	Don Juan, with Kerry Goldman and Tom Hollander

With her “old-fashioned face,” as she has described it, she is often cast in classical roles. Her performance of the dual parts of Paulina and Dorcas in a 2000 production of The Winter’s Tale was called “bracingly intelligent” (Evening Standard) and Paul Taylor of the Independent praised her for “speaking the play’s difficult verse with a thrilling intelligence.” The following year, her account of a peasant girl infatuated with Moliere’s Don Juan was praised by Kate Bassett of the Independent as “a painfully real person not merely a pastoral caricature.” The same critic called her Electra “frighteningly fevered, shaking with rage and zeal.” But she has also found great success in modern works. In Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine she played both a woman experiencing an unexpected sexual awakening and the same woman's son in “an absolutely glorious performance” (Alfred Hickling, the Guardian) that won her a nomination for Best Supporting Actress by the Theatre Management Association.

The Solid Gold Cadillac

Unlike many children of stars, Briers says she has not encountered jealously from her peers because “these days there are so many children of famous actors around it doesn't make you anything special.” Still, it can be “a double-edged sword. You are brought up with a certain amount of success around you and so have high expectations. If you don't live up to these there are moments when you think: ‘I am not as good as my father.’ I have worked through those feelings and decided that it is all right — I can be an actress in my own right.” As she has done more work, she feels that her father increasingly treats her as an equal in terms of being able to talk about the business. Occasionally he’ll even come to her for advice on how to deal with the business as it is now.

Briers married Simon Cox, an actor and director, in 1995. He has directed her in two plays, Harvest and Outside Edge. They live in north London.