Souad Faress

Souad Faress led the Dosh Khaleen, the widows of Vaes Dothrak, as their high priestess in Game of Thrones season six, and for years voiced solicitor Usha Gupta in BBC Radio 4's The Archers.

Background

Souad Adel Faress was born in Accra on 25 March 1948 to Irish and Syrian parents, and holds Ghanaian, Syrian and Irish citizenship. She grew up in Southport, Lancashire, trained as an actor at Guildhall in London and lives in London.

Stage and screen

Early BBC work included two episodes of I, Claudius (1976) and Blake's 7. In cinema she had substantial parts in Sixth Happiness (1997) and, earlier, Stephen Frears's My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), and has done a great deal of British theatre, including Hurried Steps in 2014, a play about violence against women drawn from Amnesty International accounts. On TV she has been Dev Alahan's mother in Coronation Street (2001), the Old Rani in The Sarah Jane Adventures (2009), Maryam Shakiba in Casualty (2010-11), and Eli Cohen's mother in the 2019 miniseries The Spy, as well as appearing in Inspector Morse, No Angels, Brief Encounters and Back to Life. She has also written plays.