Emily Blunt Biography

Blunt has described Ibstock Place as a pressurized environment where her fellow pupils were highly competitive and thoroughly bitchy (much like everywhere else, really). A bit of a geek and excluded from the cool set, she was ever watchful and rather lonely. Life would improve considerably when, for her A-levels, she moved on to Hurtwood House at Holmbury St Mary, near Dorking, just south of London. Hurtwood was perhaps the top co-ed boarding school in the country. Academic results were impressively high and students could enjoy rugby, football, hockey, swimming, golf and horseriding, as well as being able to work at the school's radio station and film academy. More importantly for Blunt, Hurtwood ran the best theatre studies course in the UK. Over a dozen experienced theatre practitioners worked with the kids - professional West End actors, set designers, costumiers, musicians and choreographers, as well as guest tutors from film, stage and TV.

Arriving at Hurtwood in 1999, Blunt would excel at sport, cello and singing. Quickly she'd be considered one of the school's most promising students, so much so that, after her first year, in August, 2000, she was chosen to perform at the Edinburgh Festival. The play was Bliss, written by Paul Sellar (from Hurtwood's Class of '86) and performed at The Gilded Balloon, at 233 Cowgate, the stage basically being a small platform jammed up against the end of a dank cellar. Sellar would score a critical success at the Festival that year with the black comedy Cell G159 but in many ways Bliss was more interesting, using rock music to propel forward a story where lovers Blunt and Adrian Rawlins tried desperately to reach the coast. Certainly the right people were impressed. Rawlins was an experienced actor (he was about to appear as Harry Potter's dad in the first of the franchise) who'd often work with and direct the students at Hurtwood. His agent, Ken McReddie, was now invited to Edinburgh to cast his eye over Hurtwood's star pupil and so, with a year of school still to go, Blunt was signed up, joining a client list that included Helen Mirren, Joseph Fiennes, Martin Shaw, Tim Curry, Sue Johnston, Frank Finlay and the fabulous Hilda Braid, famed for continually referring to Robert Lindsay as Foxie in Citizen Smith.

McReddie would proceed to make himself useful. Once Blunt had finished her two years at Hurtwood, he immediately scored her a place in Sir Peter Hall's The Royal Family at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, a production also featuring another of his clients, Julia McKenzie. It was an exceptionally prestigious adaptation, starring Judi Dench, Harriet Walter, Toby Stephens and Peter Bowles and, written by George S Kaufman and Edna Ferber, was loosely based on the great Barrymore acting dynasty. Set in the swinging days of the 1920s, the play would see Dench as Fanny Cavendish, Broadway star and grande dame of the family, with Walter as her daughter, now a Broadway star in her own right. The boisterous cast would jabber, scrap and swoon as the script dealt with birth, death, clashing egos, familial relationships, the shocking advent of realist theatre and - horror of horrors - granddaughter Blunt's decision to give up acting and get married.

The Royal Family would run from October, 2001, through to February the next year. April 24th would then see Blunt onstage again, in another top production. This would be Nicholas Wright's Vincent In Brixton. Staged at the National, this would be directed by Richard Eyre, the theatre legend who, the year before, had delivered the Oscar-winning Iris, featuring Blunt's recent co-star Dench. Contemplating the transforming effects of sex, love and the artistic impulse, Vincent In Brixton would cover the time spent in London by the young Van Gogh, being based on letters sent to his brother Theo. Jochum ten Haaf would star as Van Gogh as, in the 1870s, he comes to lodge in the house of widowed teacher Ursula Loyer, played by Clare Higgins. Falling for Loyer's daughter, Eugenie (Blunt), he'd be crushed when he finds she has eyes only for co-lodger Paul Nicholls, a semi-talented follower of William Morris, but quickly switches his affections to Higgins, a move that leads to disaster. With this naive but arrogant and ruthless visitor releasing the repressed sensuality in the household, the play was stirring stuff and duly won an Olivier as Best Play, with Higgins being named Best Actress. And happily, for posterity, it would be filmed by BBC4.

Blunt would remain with the production for two short runs up until the end of July, being replaced by Alice Patten. She'd rapidly move on to the Chichester Festival where she'd get her first professional taste of Shakespeare when taking the female lead in Romeo And Juliet. This was an odd production in that director Indhu Rubasingham had chosen to relocate the play from Verona to Istanbul in the early days of the Ottoman empire. The Montagues were now Muslim, the Capulets Christian and the feud between them was clearly no longer simply familial. The change meant that several scenes were unconvincing, but gravitas was lent by the events in New York the September before. Blunt was picked out by reviewers as possessing a "promising ingenuousness", becoming ever more panicked as tragedy approached. Una Stubbs would stand out as the Nurse, while Blunt would share her doomed romance with Lex Shrapnel - not, as his name might suggest, the heir to the bullet-riddled throne of Chuck Norris, but rather the grandson of Deborah Kerr, soon to join the RSC.

Juliet would be the last stage role of Blunt's early career. 2003 would see her transfer to the small screen - with initially mixed success. Indeed, her first TV production would be one of the worst in living memory, the offensively awful Boudica. Written by Andrew Davies, usually a reliable if slightly sex-obsessed adaptor of the classics, this saw Alex Kingston as the Iceni queen waging war against the might of Rome, with Blunt playing Isolda, Boudica's sensible daughter, who supports her father's policy of detente. The sets were naff, the dialogue was atrocious, the acting hammy, the budget way too low to accommodate such a story. Even Frances Barber, drawn in to play Agrippina, manipulatively flirting with her own son, Nero, was made to look silly. And the whole production was given a repulsive edge by the grotesque elongation of the sequence where Kingston is flogged and Blunt and her sister violently gang-raped. The producers, it seemed, had no time to deal even remotely convincingly with characterisation, politics or social history, instead being distastefully keen to linger on scenes of brutality and humiliation. Boudica was TV at its absolute worst - stupid, debased and demeaning.

Fortunately, Blunt would not be down in the dirt for long. Her next production, another period piece, would be the far classier Henry VIII, where Ray Winstone would play the titular monarch, backed by such thespian luminaries as Joss Ackland, Charles Dance, Helena Bonham Carter and David Suchet, Suchet sharing Blunt's agent, Ken McReddie. Unsurprisingly, this was no A Man For All Seasons. With Winstone in the lead it had to be far more gritty and raucous. And it was hugely popular, with Blunt acquitting herself well as Catherine Howard, Henry's young fifth wife, who catches his roving eye when he tires of Anne Of Cleves, then breaks his heart with her teenage dalliances - a suspected affair withTom Turner's Dereham sealing her grisly fate.

Blunt's final appearance of 2003 would be in an episode of Foyle's War, a series created by Anthony Horowitz - soon to make a fortune with Stormbreaker and the Alex Rider series - concerning a Kentish cop during WW2, solving local crimes when he'd really rather be fighting the Nazis. Blunt's episode, entitled War Games, would involve big corporations continuing to trade with Hitler's regime despite the obvious consequences. Blunt and Luke de Woolfson would play a young brother and sister working on a farm owned by the chairman of an international food company, Blunt keeping bees, struggling to protect her brother when he's unwittingly drawn into a dangerous conspiracy, and consequently helping Foyle with his enquiries.

Following this would come more TV and an episode of Poirot, again starring David Suchet, along with James Fox, Judy Pafitt and JJ Feild. This was a feature-length production, yet another adaptation of Death On The Nile, where Blunt would play the beautiful American heiress, Linnet Ridgeway-Doyle, who has stolen the fiance of her best friend and is honeymooning in Egypt. Blunt notices that she's being stalked by her former friend, played by Emma Malin, and asks for Poirot's aid, aid that is refused. When Blunt's subsequently shot dead on the cruise-liner, Poirot naturally realises that everyone, but everyone is a suspect.

Death On The Nile would be the first of two Blunt releases in 2004. The second would make her name. This was My Summer Of Love, an unsettling mood-piece based on a novel by Helen Cross. Here Nathalie Press would play a teenage tomboy in a small Yorkshire village, living in a closed pub she and her disturbed older brother, Paddy Considine, have inherited. As ex-con Considine tries to turn the place into a religious centre for born-agains, Press meets up with Blunt's upper-class Tamsin, who's spending the summer at her family's mansion. Bored, lonely and adventurous, the two girls begin an uncertain romance amidst their idyllic rural surrounds, the atmosphere becoming ever more menacing as the decadent, rebellious Blunt leads them to greater and greater extremes. The movie would be a huge critical hit, being named Best British Film at the BAFTAs, with Blunt and Press sharing the title of the Evening Standard's Most Promising Newcomer. Director Pawel Pawlikowski would note that it took him eight months to find his Tamsin, praising Blunt for her ability to transmit her thoughts without overacting, the main prerequisite of successful screen acting. Blunt was now being described as the new Kate Winslet, another actress who'd made a sudden impact in a tale of two girls in an intense, damaging relationship - Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures.

2005 would bring more TV with the miniseries Empire, the ABC network's contribution to the current rush of Roman epics, falling between Peter O'Toole's Imperium: Augustus and HBO's Rome. Empire would ignore history in favour of soap operatics as it followed the trials of Octavian after the murder of Julius Caesar, Santiago Cabrera playing the young Octavian as he grows to manhood and begins his ultimately successful war against Vincent Regan's Marc Antony. Blunt would appear as Camane, a psychic vestal virgin who risks all to save Octavian from poisonous snakes and Antony's assassins but is then dumped as he rises to power. Perhaps it all might have been less ropey had budget constraints not forced a slashing of its planned 8-hour length.

Blunt would continue with The Strange Case Of Sherlock Holmes And Arthur Conan Doyle, a biopic concerning the famous writer's turbulent middle years, when he felt shackled by a sick wife and the public's insatiable appetitite for Holmes stories. Douglas Henshall would play Doyle as he faces the outcry after he has Moriarty kill Holmes in The Final Problem and suffers terrible guilt after falling for Blunt's far younger Jean Leckie.

Blunt's final TV appearance of 2005, indeed her final TV performance before she found film stardom, would be in the BBC's Gideon's Daughter. Written and directed by Stephen Poliakoff, who'd spotted Blunt in My Summer Of Love, this saw Bill Nighy as a master spin-doctor caught up in the rise of New Labour, the death of Princess Diana and the nation's preparations for a major millennium blow-out. He's at the peak of his powers but realises his life is essentially empty as he deals in fakery and has lost his family, his wife having died of cancer and his daughter, Blunt, rejecting him for his base treatment of her mother. Nighy would make the most of an over-wordy and rather unconvincing relationship with shopgirl Miranda Richardson, a woman who's lost her son, but Blunt would stand out as the conflicted daughter, happy with her friends, hurtfully cold towards her father and movingly singing a song that opens his eyes to what he's missing.

2006 would see Blunt move with conviction onto the Silver Screen. Her first release would be Irresistible, an Australian production that saw illustrator Susan Sarandon married to architect Sam Neill. Sarandon's mother has just died and she's suffering a creative block with an important deadline approaching, matters that put a real strain on her marriage, a strain that increases when Neill hires a new IT consultant, Blunt. A serious temptress, Blunt flirts with both Neill and Sarandon, or so Sarandon thinks as she becomes ever more hysterical, stalking Blunt and pushing her husband still further away. Despite its stellar cast, the movie did not impress American distributors and went straight to DVD, but Blunt still came out a winner. Not only did she gain a supporter in Sarandon, who'd personally chosen her after viewing My Summer Of Love, but also a boyfriend in the Canadian singer Michael Buble. After filming had ended, on the 1st of May, 2005, Blunt had attended Australia's Logie TV awards, Sam Neill having been nominated for the drama Jessica. Performing that night would be Buble and Blunt would be cajoled into meeting him by Neill's daughter. Buble had in fact been engaged for some eight years but was so taken by Blunt he questioned his relationship and ended it, getting together with Blunt some months later. Now her free time would be spent at her parents' house in London, or at Buble's place in Vancouver.

Not that there was much free time. Next would come another breakthrough with The Devil Wears Prada, based on the book by Lauren Weisberger. Here Meryl Streep would dominate the show as a caustic fashion editor, utterly demanding, wholly uncompromising. Anne Hathaway would play a young secretary trying to find her way in this merciless world, with Blunt standing out as the neurotic PA charged with showing Hathaway the ropes. Terrorized by Streep, she'd be equally blunt with others, ever ready with a smirk, a sneer, a sarcastic slight or a new job that must be done RIGHT NOW. Her crazed dedication to duty and painful desire to make it to the Paris fashion shows added comedy and vulnerability, lending the film its heart.

The Devil Wears Prada would gain Blunt much kudos, but oddly no employment. For the first time in her short career, she found herself chasing work. As she had no real presence or reputation in Hollywood she found it tough. At least she did until she won a role in The Great Buck Howard, produced by Tom Hanks' Playtone company. Then the roles came pouring in. Once The Devil Wears Prada had seen Blunt nominated for both a BAFTA and a Golden Globe and Gideon's Daughter had actually won her a Golden Globe, it appeared she was made.

The long gap after the filming of The Devil Wears Prada and the welter of projects that came her way once Tom Hanks had shown an interest ensured that Blunt was ubiquitous in 2007. First came the supernatural thriller Wind Chill, produced by George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh, where two Portland college students, Blunt and Ashton Holmes, share a ride home at Christmas and, having broken down, are haunted by the spirits of people who died along the road. Next would come Charlie Wilson's War, like The Great Buck Howard produced by Hanks' Playtone. Directed by Mike Nicols, this would tell the true story of Texas congressman Wilson, played by Hanks, a boozy womaniser whose virulent anti-Communism leads him to join with rogue CIA operatives and covertly arm the Afghans in their fight against the invading Russians, thus helping to bring down the Soviet Union. Also starring would be Julia Roberts, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams.

Following this would come the aforementioned The Great Buck Howard. Here Colin Hanks would annoy his father (played by his real-life father) when he becomes assistant to aging has-been magician John Malkovich. Blunt would enter this comedy drama as an inexperienced, fast-talking young publicist, peeved that she hasn't been given a job working with Gary Oldman and forced to co-ordinate an event to get Malkovich back on the map. In the meantime, she gets to grips with Hanks Sr and Jr.

And on she'd go, joining Maria Bello and Maggie Grace in The Jane Austen Book Club, based on the novel by Karen Joy Fowler, where five women and one enigmatic guy would meet to discuss the author and her works. A mixed bunch, including a control freak, a lesbian and an abandoned wife, they'd each learn about themselves and their problems, Blunt adding drama as a secretive and unhappy bookworm teacher who, though married, is freaked out by her fantasies of sex with other guys. This monumentally busy year would end with the Sabrina-like Dan In Real Life, where straight-laced advice columnist Steve Carell, a widower struggling with three daughters, must deal with the fact that the woman of his dreams, Juliette Binoche, is now dating his irresponsible brother. Emily, meanwhile, a girl who's loved him since he was her babysitter, is waiting in the wings. Then 2008 would begin with Sunshine Cleaning, where she'd rejoin Amy Adams and Steve Zahn, co-stars in Charlie Wilson's War and The Great Buck Howard respectively. Originally set to star Ashley Judd and Zooey Deschanel, this was a black comedy where Adams, sick of cleaning houses and keen to send her young son to a good school, starts a company cleaning up at crime scenes, working with her thoroughly unreliable pot-head sister, played by Blunt.

Having grown up idolizing Judi Dench, Meryl Streep and Cate Blanchett, Blunt has already appeared alongside two of them. Given the intelligence and talent she's exhibited in her short career, it's not outrageous to suggest she may one day be ranked alongside them, too.

Dominic Wills