13 Doctor Who Guest Stars Who Were Tragically Underused

3. Imelda Staunton

In a career spanning over five decades Imelda Staunton has firmly established herself as a formidable force on both the stage and the screen and you only have to watch her portrayal of Dolores Umbridge in Harry Potter to see that she has no difficulty owning the scene. She's also an Oscar nominated actress for her titular role in Vera Drake with a showreel of other critically acclaimed performances to her name so it's strange that her 2011 guest appearance in Doctor Who wasn't preceded by a bigger buzz. Perhaps that's because it wasn't even announced - not to the mainstream press, at least - which was probably for the best seeing as she hardly appears in the episode anyway. In fact, she wasn't physically in it at all. She left a somewhat anticlimactic mark on Doctor Who in Series 6's The Girl Who Waited as the ominous voice of the Interface and while hers was the perfect articulation for a super computer to possess, it does feel like she was tragically underused and the role could've just as easily gone to somebody less well known. It says a lot about the power of Doctor Who that she was happy to participate, though, and it probably only took her a day to record it anyway. At least the door is still open for her to appear properly and that's also true of our next underused guest star...