Frances J. de Lautour (born 30 July 1944), better known as Frances de la Tour, is an English actress. She is known for her role as Miss Ruth Jones in the television sitcom Rising Damp from 1974 until 1978. She is a Tony Award winner and three-time Olivier Award winner. She performed as Mrs. Lintott in the play The History Boys in London and on Broadway, winning the 2006 Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play. She reprised the role in the 2006 film. Her other film roles include Madame Olympe Maxime in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005). Television roles include Emma Porlock in the Dennis Potter serial Cold Lazarus (1996), headmistress Margaret Baron in BBC sitcom Big School and Violet Crosby in the sitcom Vicious. Early life and family De la Tour was born on 30 July 1944 in Bovingdon, Hertfordshire, to Moyra (née Fessas) and Charles de la Tour (1909–1982). The name was also spelled De Lautour, and it was in this form that her birth was registered in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, in the third quarter of 1944. She has French, Greek, and Irish ancestry. She was educated at London's Lycée Français and the Drama Centre London. She is the sister of actor and screenwriter Andy de la Tour, and was briefly married to playwright Tom Kempinski. She has a son and a daughter. An episode of the BBC series Who Do You Think You Are?, first broadcast on 22 October 2015, revealed de la Tour to be a descendant of the aristocratic Delaval family. Career Theatre After leaving drama school, she joined the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) in 1965. Over the next six years, she played many small roles with the RSC in a variety of plays, gradually building up to larger parts such as Hoyden in The Relapse and culminating in Peter Brook's acclaimed production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, in which she played Helena as a comic "tour de force". In the 1970s, she worked steadily both on the stage and on television. Some of her notable appearances were Rosalind in As You Like It at the Playhouse, Oxford in 1975 and Isabella in The White Devil at the Old Vic in 1976. She enjoyed a collaboration with Stepney's Half Moon Theatre, appearing in the London première of Dario Fo's We Can't Pay? We Won't Pay (1978), Eleanor Marx's Landscape