From 2010 to 2015, she portrayed Anna Bates in the ITV period drama series Downton Abbey, for which she received three Emmy nominations and won the 2014 Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress.

Her parents, Ann and Keith Froggatt, having run a corner shop, next started a rare-breed sheep farm on a smallholding near Whitby.

[5] Froggatt initially joined a drama group in Scarborough,[6] and then left her family home at the age of 13 to attend the Redroofs Theatre School in Maidenhead, Berkshire.

In 1996, Froggatt made her TV debut in the long-running ITV drama The Bill, and shortly afterwards landed the role of teenage mother Zoe Tattersall in Coronation Street.

In 2003, Froggatt played the leading role in the controversial one-off drama Danielle Cable: Eyewitness, based on the true story of a teenage girl who witnessed the murder of her boyfriend in a reputed road rage attack.

[9] Froggatt starred as a main character in the drama Missing, made by SMG Productions in 2006, alongside Gregor Fisher.

She later appeared in another controversial role as the title character in Joanne Lees: Murder in the Outback, which first aired on Channel Ten in Australia on 18 March 2007, and was screened in Britain on ITV on 8 April 2007.

She appeared on the London stage in the adaptation of All About My Mother in the part of Sister Rosa, which ran from July to November 2007 at the Old Vic Theatre.

[19] Along with Downton Abbey in 2013, Froggatt had roles in the comedy drama based on Irvine Welsh's novel Filth, in the thriller uwantme2killhim?, and an indie directed by Uberto Pasolini, Still Life.

[21] In 2016, she starred in a two-part ITV mini-series titled Dark Angel, based on the true story of Victorian poisoner Mary Ann Cotton.

Her character awakens, convinced that she was raped by respected surgeon Andrew Earlham (Ioan Gruffudd), who is also the father of one of her students, even though she cannot remember the incident, nor does forensic evidence bear out her version of events.