Dominique McElligott

After getting her start on Irish television, Dominique McElligott has gradually made the transition to features and small screen series with international audiences. Her early credits included the Irish program "On Home Ground," which she starred in as the protagonist Cora Collins from 2001 to 2002. This led to her being cast in the '05 television drama "Whiskey Echo," a joint production of Canada and Ireland shot in South Africa, about international aid workers caught in a war zone. Following a hiatus of a few years, McElligott returned to television and the big screen with a vengeance in "Raw," an '08 drama about a restaurant staff; and the European horror flick "Dark Floors," in which she played a nurse trapped in a hospital overrun with monsters.

Over the next two years, she left the cast of "Raw," but appeared in small parts in the independent sci-fi film "Moon" and the big studio romantic comedy "Leap Year." So far in the 2010s, McElligott's best-known work has allowed her to show off her tougher and vulnerable sides. Along with the independent Western "Blackthorn," she co-stars in the critically-acclaimed cable series "Hell on Wheels" as Lily Bell, a frontier widow forced to adjust to a pitiless world.