She moved to Glasgow to attend the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, after which she was in repertory companies at Perth and at The Little Theatre on the Isle of Mull.

[4] During the Second World War McIntosh's grandfather was captured at Dunkirk and died of pneumonia in a German prisoner-of-war camp in Poland.

[6] She then played in the RSC production of Dickens' Great Expectations,[6] and starred as Portia in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, and in The Scent of Roses at the Lyceum in Edinburgh.

She has also appeared in several other television dramas, including Psychos,[10] Ghost Squad,[10] Marple,[10] Murder City,[10] Bodies-2 and Low Winter Sun.

[10] In December 2009 McIntosh appeared in an episode of Sky 1's 10 Minute Tales playing the wife of Peter Capaldi's character.

[10] McIntosh returned as a new Silurian character, Madame Vastra,[3] in the Doctor Who Series 6 mid-series episode "A Good Man Goes to War", which aired in the UK on 4 June 2011.

She also appeared as Janina for 2 episodes of Dracula – a British-American horror drama TV series that premièred on NBC on 25 October 2013.

In each of these episodes, she reprises her role as Madame Vastra, who along with her wife, Jenny Flint, and Strax, a former Sontaran nurse, form an investigating team.