Nicola Mary Coughlan is an Irish actress known for her roles as Clare Devlin in the Channel 4 sitcom Derry Girls (2018–2022) and Penelope Featherington in the Netflix period drama Bridgerton (2020–present).
Early Life
Coughlan was born on 9 January 1987 in Galway, Ireland, and grew up in Oranmore. She decided to become an actress at the age of five when she watched her older sister performed in a school play.
She attended Scoil Mhuire for primary school and Calasanctius College for secondary school. She graduated with a degree in English and Classical Civilisation from the National University of Ireland, Galway.
Coughlan then went on to train in England at the Oxford School of Drama and Birmingham School of Acting. She lives in London.
Career
At the age of 10, in 1997, Nicola Coughlan had an uncredited role in action thriller film My Brother’s War. In 2004, she started her career with a role in Tom Collins’ short film, The Phantom Cnut, a revenge comedy. In the following years, she did various voice works in animated series. At some point, due to financial difficulties, Coughlan had to go back to Ireland. She was suffering from depression during this period and her family helped her through the entire process. She worked part-time at an optician in Galway. She responded to an open casting call for Jess and Joe Forever at The Old Vic in London and won the main role of Jess. The first performance was in September 2016 prior to a national tour.
She had her breakthrough in 2018, when she began playing Clare Devlin, one of the main characters, in Derry Girls. This sitcom is set in Derry, Northern Ireland, in the 1990s. The series was broadcast in January and February 2018 on Channel 4. But it was after its rerelease onto streaming platform Netflix in December of the same year that the show gained an international audience and an instant popularity.
In the same year, she also played Hannah Dalton in Harlots. The period drama television series is set in 18th-century London. 2018 marked her West End debut in The Donmar Warehouse’s production of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. The Evening Standard named her “one of the Rising Stars of 2018”.
The same year, she competed against some of her Derry Girls co-stars in an episode of the show The Great British Bake Off.
In 2019, it was announced that Coughlan had been cast in the Netflix series Bridgerton, which premiered in December 2020. In this period-drama series based on the best-selling Julia Quinn book series of the same name, Coughlan plays Penelope Featherington, a reluctant debutante and youngest daughter of a nouveau-riche family in Regency-era London.
Net Worth
She has amassed fortune of approximately £1.6m, according to AgeNetWorth.
