Madden is best known internationally for her multiple leading Agatha Christie, Shakespeare, and Tom Stoppard roles filmed for television, and for her performance as Marianne Dashwood in the 1971 BBC miniseries adaption of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility. She appeared in more than 30 television series, teleplays, made-for-television movies, and television miniseries, including a starring performance in the miniseries A Married Man (1984) opposite Anthony Hopkins. She also had major roles in five feature films, including Gawain and the Green Knight (1973), the cult horror film The Beast Must Die (1974), Spy Story (1976) and Swing Kids (1993).
She had originally trained at the Ruskin School of Art at the University of Oxford prior to enrolling at RADA. In the late 1990s she gave up acting and returned to painting, focusing on portraits, and received a diploma from the Heatherley School of Fine Art in London. In 2001 she moved to Dorset with her second husband, John Tyler, whom she had married in 1987. Her previous husband, whom she had married in 1972, was John Scrivenor; they had a son born in late 1972.
