British actress Florence Pugh

Florence Pugh is part of the newest (as of 2021) generation of British actresses.

She first came to the attention of her countrymen in The Falling, as a teenager at a boarding school where the girls started having mass fainting spells.  Her performance was lauded by one critic as being one "bearing with the vulnerability of one still unsure of her own body."  A couple of years later (2016), Ms. Pugh played Katherine Lester, a young woman caught in a loveless marriage with an older man, in Lady Macbeth, which was set in the nineteenth century and had nothing to so with a Shakespeare play.

But Ms. Pugh has performed Shakespeare - namely, Cordelia in a BBC production of King Lear in 2018.  And she finally got the attention of American audiences with her performance as Amy March in actress/director Greta Gerwig's 2019 film version of Little Women.  (Ms. Gerwig is an earlier honoree on this blog.)   

With more films currently in the pipeline, Ms. Pugh is clearly on her way to being a mainstay among twenty-first century British actors.