The quality that got her rejected by every drama school turned out to be the thing David Fincher couldn't resist.
At a glance
- Known for
- Amy Dunne in *Gone Girl*, Bond girl in *Die Another Day*, Moiraine in *The Wheel of Time*
- Before fame
- Rejected by every drama school, read English at Oxford instead
- Off-screen
- Only child of two opera singers, grew up backstage across Europe
Rise to Fame
Every drama school in England turned her down. She went to Oxford, got an English degree, and walked into a Bond film. At 21, she played Miranda Frost in Die Another Day after an audition that reportedly involved being asked to strip to her underwear. She refused and got the part anyway.
The Bond exposure backfired. She's said she felt "known by everybody but respected by none," so she stopped doing interviews and spent the next decade in supporting roles. David Fincher cast her as Amy Dunne in Gone Girl because he'd watched her in multiple films and couldn't form a fixed impression. That inscrutability was exactly what Amy Dunne required. The film grossed over $370 million and earned her an Oscar nomination, which is one way to prove drama schools wrong.
In the Spotlight
She's cornered a specific market: women who smile while destroying you. After Gone Girl proved she could carry a thriller, she won a Golden Globe for playing an elder-abuse scammer in I Care a Lot, thanking "America's broken legal system" in her acceptance speech. She stole Saltburn from under Barry Keoghan as the obliviously cruel Lady Elspeth, earning a BAFTA nomination.
The stage pivot is the more interesting move. She made her National Theatre debut in Inter Alia, playing a Crown Court judge, and won the Critics Circle Theatre Award for Best Actress. The production transfers to Broadway later this year. She runs a production company and has two Guy Ritchie films in the pipeline. Not interested in being a legacy act.
Side Notes
Both her parents were professional musicians. Her father sang opera, her mother played concert violin, and she spent her childhood getting dragged around European opera houses before landing at boarding school in Bristol. She plays piano and cello but chose the career where you don't have to practice scales.
Her partner since 2009, Robie Uniacke, is roughly 18 years older and taught himself Mandarin so he could raise their two sons bilingually. He's an Eton-educated businessman with a complicated past, including years of addiction and a ban from company directorships. She's never seemed bothered by any of it. They reportedly got secretly married.