Emily Barclay

Emily Barclay (born 24 October 1984 in Plymouth, UK) is an English-born, New Zealand AFI award winning actress. 2Career Emily Barclay was born in Plymouth to a General practitioner and a landscape designer, and raised in Auckland, New Zealand, where she went to an all-girls school and attended Saturday morning drama classes. At the age of nine, Barclay played Hamlet in a school production and decided to become an actress. At the age of 13, she got herself an agent, and supported herself between TV movies by working in a video store. Diana Rowan (the same casting agent who discovered Anna Paquin, Keisha Castle-Hughes, and Jonathan Taylor Thomas) discovered Barclay in a school play and cast her as Celia in 2004's In My Father's Den, that rose the actress to prominence. For that film, Barclay won Most Promising Newcomer at the 2005 British Independent Film Awards. She followed by moving to Australia – while continuing part-time with her degree in English and gender studies at the University of Auckland – for a role in the critically acclaimed 2006 black comedy Suburban Mayhem directed by Paul Goldman, for which she collected an AFI Award for Best Actress. Barclay's performance also lead to an invitation to her first stage performance, on Neil Armfield's 2009 production of Gethsemane in Sydney. Armfield later indicated Barclay to Lee Lewis, who cast her in the play That Face. In 2011, she performed in another Belvoir production, The Seagull, and acted opposite Geoffrey Rush in the Melbourne Theatre Company's The Importance of Being Earnes