As an actress, Kneale appeared in several BBC miniseries and one-off plays, including Tender Is the Night (with Mary Steenburgen), Dead Head, and To Play the King (from the House of Cards trilogy), as well as episodes of Casualty and the sitcom Brush Strokes. She was a regular for one season of the long-running sitcom Never the Twain (as Donald Sinden's daughter-in-law, 1988) and appeared in the 1989 film Scandal (with John Hurt and Bridget Fonda).