Hannah Thornton

Hannah Thornton runs her son John's household in Milton with a rigidity that borders on ferocity. Widowed and scarred by past ruin, she has staked everything on his success as a mill master, and she trusts no one—least of all the genteel newcomer Margaret Hale—who might distract him from it or judge him for what he's built.

Sinéad Cusack plays her without a shred of softening charm, and that's precisely the point: Hannah's love for her son is real, total, and expressed almost entirely as suspicion and steel. She's a mother whose fierceness was forged by poverty, and the show never asks you to like her before it asks you to understand her.