Sophie Anna Ward (born 30 December 1964)[1] is a British stage and screen actress, and a writer of non-fiction and fiction from London.

As an actress, she played Jocelyn Sheffield in The Nanny, she also played Elizabeth Hardy, the female lead in Barry Levinson's Young Sherlock Holmes (1985), and in other feature film roles including in Cary Joji Fukunaga's period drama Jane Eyre (2011), and Jane Sanger's horror feature, Swiperight (2020).

[6][independent source needed] She earned a BA honours degree in English with Philosophy from the Open University.[when?

In 1983, she had a brief, non-speaking role at the very end of the Tony Scott vampire movie The Hunger; in the credits, her character is listed as "Girl In London House".

[12][13] She has appeared in several Glasgow Citizens' Theatre productions including Private Lives (as Amanda), Don Carlos (as Queen Elizabeth) and in Hamlet (as Ophelia).

[23][24] Her role in the first (2009) series of Land Girls earned her a regional (Midlands) RTS Television Award for best acting performance (by a female) in that year.

[25] Especially since beginning her advanced academic work, Ward has been writing professionally, including for newspapers The Guardian, The Times, and The Spectator, and the online journalism network, The Conversation.

[7] Ward's debut novel, Love and Other Thought Experiments[26] was published in 2020 by Corsair, an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group.