Miss Jane Murdstone Zoë Wanamaker A steely cold woman, Miss Murdstone moves into young David's home and becomes the willing instrument for her brother's tyrannies. She hates David from the first moment she meets him and loses no opportunity to torment him. "I've scoured the book, on every page ... and there is no redeeming feature in Jane Murdstone at all," laughs Zoë Wanamaker, fresh from a Broadway triumph playing the title role in Electra. "I find Jane a woman without a modicum of niceness in her ... and that's fabulous. It's great. I don't think I have ever played a really nasty person. So it's good fun to play this sort of character." Dickens gives just a line of description which Wanamaker and the makeup team followed to the letter. "I wear dark lenses to make my eyes more piercing, eyebrows that almost meet in the middle. And I even get a little moustache on my face to make it really horrible. When Dickens writes a character he doesn't like, there is no subtext. You never see another side of Jane." Wanamaker was born in New York. Her father, the late American actor and director Sam Wanamaker, campaigned for many years for the building of a replica of London's Globe Theatre, only to die before it became a reality. Her mother was the actress Charlotte Holland. "I think the U.S. sees me as an English person and in England I am the token American," says Wanamaker, who played royal twin Cora in the all-star BBC/WGBH serial Gormenghast, seen on PBS during the summer of 2001. Wanamaker also joins castmate Daniel Radcliffe in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, playing Madame Hooch.