At the BAFTA Television Awards 2026, held at the Royal Festival Hall in London on Sunday night, Narges Rashidi took home Best Leading Actress for her performance in Prisoner 951. It was her first BAFTA. She dedicated the award to Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, the British-Iranian woman whose story the drama tells, who was sitting in the audience. The moment was as loaded as the role itself.
The Role
Prisoner 951 is a four-part BBC drama directed by Philippa Lowthorpe, telling the true story of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian charity worker who was falsely accused of spying and detained in Iran for six years. To prepare for the role, Rashidi read Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s forthcoming memoir A Yard Of Sky, co-written with her husband Richard. Her starting point was a clip of Zaghari-Ratcliffe being arrested at the airport. “Many of us only know Nazanin post her release,” Rashidi said. “I was really interested to find out who she was before all that, and how it felt to really go through it.”
Who Narges Rashidi Is
Iranian-born and raised between Tehran, Germany, and the United States, Rashidi spent a significant part of her childhood in Iran, leaving for Germany at age seven — a background she said helped her access the emotional and political realities of the role in a deeply personal way. She is not a newcomer; she has been working steadily in European and British television and film for years, but this is the win that changes the conversation around her name.
For the Arab and Middle Eastern world, her victory carries a particular resonance. An Iranian actress, playing a woman imprisoned by her own government, is winning British television’s most prestigious acting award, with the real woman watching from the audience. Some performances outlast their screen time. This is one of them.
