is an English television actress and playwright. She has played recurring roles in the ITV soap opera Coronation Street and crime drama Scott & Bailey, as well as in the Netflix six-part mockumentary sitcom Hard Cell. She has also written and performed in numerous theatrical productions, including her play Two Sisters, which received nominations for two Manchester Evening News Theatre Awards for Best Play and Best Performance in 2007, and a one-woman show about the eminent Restoration actress Nell Gwyn.
Harding was born and raised in Marlow, Buckinghamshire, England. She graduated from the Guildford School of Acting and worked extensively for the Royal Shakespeare Company in the late '80s.
Together with fellow actress Candida Gubbins, she formed the theatre company Two Friends Productions in 2000. Soon after, she made her debut as a playwright with Postcards from Maupassant, a 2001 play based on the late 19th-century short stories by French author Guy de Maupassant, in which she also starred. It first premiered at the Edinburgh Festival and then, after receiving rave reviews from critics, went on a national tour. Sam Marlowe of The Times wrote: "All three actors are excellent throughout, but here Harding in particular is painfully funny and sad as the child-like, crazed wife. Her portrayal is still more impressive when you consider that, by contrast, just a couple of scenes earlier she was an elegant, icy society doyenne in sequins and silk." Ten years after the initial premiere, Harding adapted it into French Fancies.
Her next play was Two Sisters, a gripping black comedy set in 1880's Russia and directed by Chris Gascoyne. First performed in July 2006 at the Buxton Festival, it was soon followed by a national tour and nominations for two Manchester Evening News Theatre Awards for Best Play and Best Performance. Around the same time, Harding starred in the productions of Terrence McNally's Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune (2004), Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing (2005) and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (2007).
In 2008 she wrote and performed a one-woman show about one of the first actresses on the English stage and a long-time mistress of King Charles II of England, Nell Gwyn. She called it Pretty Witty Nell after a description of Gwyn by Samuel Pepys, the famed diarist and social commentator of the day. Described by Harding as "a sort of historical stand-up", the show toured the UK for two years.
