Vanessa Kirby

Vanessa Kirby (born 18 April 1988) is an English stage, TV and film actress. She starred as Estella in the BBC adaptation of Great Expectations in 2011, as Joanna in Richard Curtis' romantic comedy About Time in 2013, and currently portrays Princess Margaret in Peter Morgan's Netflix series The Crown, for which she has been nominated for the British Academy Television Award for Best Supporting Actress. She is known mostly for her stage work; Variety in 2016 called her "the outstanding stage actress of her generation, capable of the most unexpected choices". 2Life and career Kirby was raised in Wimbledon, London; her father was a urologist and her mother was a founder of Country Living magazine. Vanessa Redgrave and Corin Redgrave were family friends. She was educated at Lady Eleanor Holles School in Hampton. After being turned down by Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, she took a gap year to travel before studying English at Exeter University. She then turned down her place at LAMDA in London after she was signed to a talent agency and met the theatre director David Thacker, who gave her three starring roles over 2009 at the Octagon Theatre Bolton: in All My Sons by Arthur Miller, Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen, and A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare. For All My Sons she won the BIZA Rising Star Award at the Manchester Evening News Theatre Awards, worth £5,000. She then went on to star at the National Theatre as Isabella in Women Beware Women by Thomas Middleton, directed by Marianne Elliott, alongside Harriet Walter and Harry Potter's Harry Mellin