Vanessa Kirby

Vanessa Kirby (born April 18, 1988, London, England) is a British stage and screen actress who gained fame for her nuanced portrayal of the young Princess Margaret, sister of Queen Elizabeth II, in the first two seasons (2016–17) of Netflix’s The Crown.

Early life

Kirby grew up in Wimbledon, London, with an elder brother, Joe Kirby, and a younger sister, Juliet Kirby. Her father, Roger Kirby, was a urologist, and her mother, Jane Kirby, was a former editor of Country Living magazine. Vanessa Kirby and her siblings spent their youth watching movies and going to see plays, where her love for theater began. By the time she turned 11, she had found community in her after-school drama club and a passion for acting.

Education and first stage roles

After graduating high school, Kirby auditioned for drama school but was told she needed more experience. She took a gap year and then enrolled at the University of Exeter, in southwestern England. In 2009 she earned a degree in English literature and was offered a spot at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA). She turned it down, however, after being cast in three productions at the Octagon Theatre Bolton, a town northwest of Manchester. Kirby made her professional stage debut in a production of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons (2009), and she went on to appear in Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts (2009) and William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2010). She earned rave reviews for each of her performances.

On-screen debut and subsequent parts

In addition to the stage, Kirby began to appear on screen. She made her film debut in 2010 with a minor role in the romantic drama Love/Loss and her television debut in 2011 with appearances in three episodes of the BBC’s The Hour, a newsroom drama series. For the latter, she was thrilled to work with her idol Ben Whishaw, whom she had seen in the lead role of Hamlet (2004) at the Old Vic Theatre, London, three times. She also landed the lead role of Estella in a BBC adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (2011). Kirby continued to balance screen and stage roles, appearing in productions of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters (2012), Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (2014 and 2016), and Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya (2016). Her roles on screen included parts in About Time (2013), Queen & Country (2014), Jupiter Ascending (2015), and Me Before You (2016).

The Crown

In 2016 Kirby blew audiences away with her layered, ebullient performance as Princess Margaret on the hit Netflix series The Crown. She told The Guardian in 2018 that she kept a photo of Margaret in her bedroom. “I wanted to try and find the person she was before she hardened, before she became bitter and self-loathing,” Kirby explained. “I wanted to find the torment that’s underneath those things. That, for me, made a real woman, even though the circumstances were ridiculous.” Her portrayal garnered her nominations for an Emmy Award and a BAFTA Award. She won the latter for best supporting actress in 2018 for the show’s second season. The cast changed for the following season, and Kirby recounted that “The Crown was the best time of my life. Saying goodbye to it was awful, I really grieved it, actually.”

Mission: Impossible and roles from the late 2010s

Kirby subsequently received a number of parts in major films, including the sixth installment (2018) of Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible series (as well as Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One [2023]) and Hobbes and Shaw (2019), the Fast & Furious franchise spin-off. She also starred onstage, in the Royal National Theatre’s 2018 production of Julie, a contemporary rewrite of August Strindberg’s Miss Julie.

Roles in the 2020s

In 2020 Kirby garnered enthusiastic reviews for her powerful performance in Pieces of a Woman, playing a grieving young mother. She was nominated for an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, and a BAFTA Award for best lead actress and won the Volpi Cup for best actress at the Venice Film Festival. Subsequent roles include leads in the movies The World to Come (2020), Italian Studies (2021), and The Son (2022). In 2023 Kirby starred as Empress Joséphine, the first wife of Napoleon Bonaparte, in Ridley Scott’s epic film Napoleon.

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Aluna Entertainment

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 Kirby and her sister decided to form a production company dedicated to exploring the female experience. The following year they founded Aluna Entertainment. Kirby told Harper’s Bazaar in 2023, “There have been so few female directors, female-led movies and female protagonists in the past, which means there are lots of spaces and genres in which we haven’t seen real, messy, human women on screen before. That’s a mission of mine with the company—to put women on screen who I feel are like me, rather than invincible.” In 2021 Aluna inked a multiyear deal with Netflix to develop and produce female-centric stories.