With its many roles for young people, Pride and Prejudice gave opportunities to a host of actors just starting out in the business. Most of them were unknowns at the time of production, but in the decade that has passed several have gone on to great success. One of these is Lucy Davis.

Nowadays, Davis is best known as Dawn Tinsley, the receptionist in the hugely successful BBC sitcom The Office. But British radio listeners also know her as Hayley, the saintly caregiver in the long-running soap opera The Archers. And tabloid readers all over the country have followed the real-life drama involved in her 1997 kidney transplant.

On the BBC's Big Breakfast show

What many who have watched or worked with her don’t even realize, however, is that Lucy Davis is the daughter of one of Britain’s best-known comics, Jasper Carrott. Since she is determined to succeed on her own, she has worked hard to hide the fact. When she was born, in 1973, her father was unknown and barely able to support the family, but a hit comedy record in 1975 paved the way for future success. Four years later he was named ITV Personality of the Year, a title later bestowed on him by the BBC. His decision in the 1980s to buy a stake in the TV production company Celador (which produces, among other shows, Who Wants to be a Millionaire) has made him a multimillionaire.

	The Office

Pride and Prejudice enabled her to get an agent, and before the series aired she landed a one-time appearance on The Archers that developed into a permanent role. Guest spots on TV and commercial voiceovers followed for several years until, just before New Year’s 2000, she won the role of Dawn in The Office.

Davis’s naturalistic acting style fit in perfectly with the show’s “mockumentary” format. “From the moment Lucy walked into audition, she gave a performance based on her understanding of real people, real behaviour,” Stephen Merchant, The Office's co-writer and co-director, told the Express in 2004. “There's this universally accepted style of TV drama acting that is considered ‘realistic.’ But it’s only realistic compared with other TV dramas. We spent ages looking for people who didn’t rely on those normal drama school tricks. And you simply couldn’t see Lucy's acting.”

The Office was such a success in Britain that it was added to the BBC America lineup. Although the cable network reaches only a small minority of American homes, the show made enough of an impact to win the 2004 Golden Globe Award for Best Comedy—to the surprise of its young cast, which had flown to Los Angeles for the ceremony. (At the post-ceremony press conference, reporters asked Davis which designer she was wearing. She replied that she had bought her outfit off the rack for £47 at a shop called Pilot. “'The equivalent in America would be something like K-Mart.’ There were a few strange looks.”)

Davis’s success capped a comeback from a near-death experience. While undergoing a routine physical for Pride and Prejudice in 1994 she was diagnosed with reflux nephropathy—a kind of kidney failure—and a transplant was recommended. After several years of fruitless search for donors, doctors reluctantly agreed to let Davis’s mother, Hazel, give one of her own kidneys. The operations were conducted in December 1997 and recuperation was a slow, frustrating process. She developed diabetes, and the combination of steroids and a lack of exercise caused her weight to balloon from 112 lbs. to 168 (she is 5'3"). Even today she must swallow two dozen pills a day to keep her body from rejecting the transplanted kidney. But her attitude has remained upbeat. “My career was going well and I was really happy and so I was desperate to go on as though nothing was wrong,” she told an interviewer in 2002. “I hate being down and so when this happened, I never went through that phase of asking, ‘Why me?’ because I knew it wouldn’t get me anywhere.”

Early in 2005, Davis moved to Los Angeles. “I didn’t know a single soul when I came out, not one,” she said in a 2006 interview. “Nobody picked me up in a limo at the airport. I hired a car and got a dodgy room, and I woke up the first morning and thought, ‘This is the most stupid thing I’ve ever done. I need to go home. I need my local pub.’ I cried myself to sleep the first two weeks. But I didn’t want to wake up when I was 50 and think, ‘I wish I’d done that.’ In the end, you just have to embrace it.”

Hollywood seems to have embraced Davis, too. In two years she has appeared in films with Bill Murray and David Duchovny and in major TV series. Her success abroad brought down on her the wrath of the British tabloids, which printed venomous stories about her weight loss. Davis was so upset about the untruths she read that she consulted a lawyer to sue for libel, but in the end decided just to shrug it off.

Hollywood has been good to her in other ways. At Christmas 2005, she met a Welsh actor named Owen Yeoman who was also working in L.A. A year later they were married in London's St. Paul's Cathedral.