When Calls The Heart: Who Plays Mrs. St. John & Where Else Have You Seen Her

It's almost hard to fathom, but the Hallmark Channel original series "When Calls the Heart" has been on the air for close to a full decade. And with the period drama's 10th season currently unfolding on the greetings card company's network, it's now well past the 100-episode mark of its small screen run. The new season has, of course, brought a few new faces to Hope Valley. And perhaps one of the more intriguing belongs to the mysterious Madeleine St. John.

Hailing from Philadelphia, PA, Madeleine's intentions in Hope Valley remain a bit unclear, but Mrs. St. John's stay in the sleepy town is obviously just beginning. That means fans of "When Calls the Heart" should be prepping to see a lot more of Stefanie von Pfetten, the actor behind the character. And that fact should be exciting for those fans as von Pfetten is clearly having a ball bringing the fashionable Madeleine St. John to life onscreen.

Stefanie von Pfetten has, of course, brought the same flair for character to several roles in the past, including a recent stint on the blood-spattered Syfy series "Day of the Dead." The actor turned up for three episodes of the zombie drama as a survivor named Cindy who loses her sister to the zombie plague and then goes on to play a part in the bloody last stand of the Paymart.

Though "Day of the Dead" marks one of the bigger roles in Stefanie von Pfetten's recent oeuvre, it's far from the biggest on the actor's resumé. In fact, the Vancouver native has been working professionally since the late 1990s, earning early credits on Canadian television productions like "The Sentinel" and "First Wave." In 2000, von Pfetten turned up on the made-for-TV Dean Koontz adaptation "Sole Survivor," before landing small roles in the Josh Hartnett vehicle "40 Days and 40 Nights" and the early 2000s reboot of "The Twilight Zone," as well as a leading role in the 2002 murder mystery "Posers."

The actor appeared in a string of projects in 2004, fronting the horror thriller "Decoys," and scoring one-off roles on "CSI: Miami" and the cult sci-fi hit "Andromeda." In 2005, von Pfetten appeared on an episode of "The L Word," and followed that in 2006 with one of her biggest roles, memorably portraying Viper pilot Marcia "Showboat" Case on an episode of the "Battlestar Galactica" reboot. In 2009, von Pfetten also booked an episode of the smash-hit procedural "NCIS," and in 2010, she portrayed Greek Goddess Demeter in "Percy Jackson and the Olympians." 

In the years since, von Pfetten has played the lead on the CBC drama "Cracked," and portrayed Katharina Wegener, the wife of Nazi conspirator Rudolph Wegener, in a pair of "The Man in High Castle" episodes. More recently, von Pfetten played Hollywood legend Marlene Deitrich in the Amazon Prime Video drama "The Last Tycoon," had a minor role in "Welcome to Marwen," and appeared as Russian physicist Dr. Irina Petrov on a thrilling episode of The CW Arrowverse saga "DC's Legends of Tomorrow."