Vanessa Kirby

Vanessa Kirby is an English stage, television and film actress. She starred as Estella in the BBC adaptation of Great Expectations in 2011 and as Joanna in Richard Curtis\' romantic comedy About Time in 2013. From 2016 to 2017, Kirby portrayed Princess Margaret in Peter Morgan\'s Netflix series The Crown, for which she won the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role in a Television Series and received a nomination for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series in 2018. 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". In 2018, she played White Widow in the U.S. blockbuster Mission: Impossible – Fallout.\n', ' Kirby was raised in Wimbledon, London. Her mother is a former magazine editor, and her father is urologist Roger Kirby. Actors Vanessa Redgrave and Corin Redgrave were family friends.\n', ' 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 the University of Exeter. 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.\n', '