Natalie Dormer Writes a Gloriously Powerful Op-Ed on the Importance of Voting

By Cindy Davis | Celebrity | May 7, 2015 |

Voting in the United Kingdom’s general election is taking place today, with Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron facing off against Labour Leader Ed Miliband in what’s said to be a dead heat, and Game of Thrones’ Natalie Dormer has something to say.

“We owe it to the women of the world to vote.”

Amen, sister! We already knew we loved the actress who portrays Cersei Lannister’s über-polite daughter-in-law and nemesis, but this beautiful essay she’s written for today’s Telegraph really seals the deal.

A few excerpts:

“I urge everyone to vote, we have a responsibility to engage with shaping our present and the future. We’re obviously having a crisis in apathy, the figures speak for themselves. I think that’s a great shame because it’s been a long hard struggle to get us to this point of universal suffrage and I think people should think about how hard it was to get to this point.
I don’t come from a household that discussed those things at the dinner table but I began watching Question Time in my teenage years. I was thinking of going to university to read history and that’s when I really made the effort to pay attention to contemporary politics. I’m always listening to Today in Parliament or The World at One on Radio 4 when I’m shooting in America and feeling a bit homesick, it makes me feel attached to what’s going on at home…

…I just played a woman in the late 1700s in The Woman in Red for the BBC which is going to be out later this year, it’s based around a woman living in Georgian England. At the time, in the 1780s, women were still the legal property of their husbands. I think it’s very easy for young women to take for granted the fight that was taken to give us a political voice and financial independence.

We owe it twofold: we owe it to the women of history, to the Pankhursts and the Davisons and the Wollstonecrafts. But more importantly we owe it to the women who are alive right now in other parts of the world who are denied it. There are so many parts of the world where girls don’t even have the right to go to school, let alone own their own property, let alone vote and have a political voice. So we owe it to the women of the rest of the world to exercise the power that was hard-won for us.”

In the full piece, Dormer discusses her personal connection to the NHS crisis, its need for revision, and how her love of history informs her view on current politics. It’s a powerful read, and if you’re anything like me, will only leave you more in love.