At drama school, she won the Awarded Audience Prize and Best Fight Award at the 2003 RADA Prize Fights. She was also nominated for two Evening Standard Awards (the Milton Shulman Award for Outstanding Newcomer and Best Actress) in November 2007 for her critically acclaimed performance as Laura Wingfield in Tennessee Williams' classic play The Glass Menagerie at the Apollo Theatre in London.
Hale trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, graduating in 2005, and has performed on both stage and screen.
In September 2009 Hale made her Royal National Theatre debut in Our Class, a new play by Tadeusz Slobodzianek, and in October 2009 she appeared alongside Robbie Coltrane and Sharon Small in the new three-part ITV1 drama Murderland. In April 2011 she appeared as Agnes Rackham in the BBC adaptation The Crimson Petal and the White. In June 2013, she played Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII, in the BBC series The White Queen, based on Philippa Gregory's bestselling historical novel series The Cousins' War. In the same year, she starred as Elinor Dashwood in Helen Edmundson's BBC Radio 4 adaptation of Sense and Sensibility.
