lily james

Like her laughing character in “Cinderella,” she’s not meant to be exploited by her stepmother with mundane tasks, but as soon as she’s out in the open she’s become the queen of the ball. If she left her glass slipper, any movie fan would run in search of her, as Lily James has left behind after going through “Downton Abbey”. She looks better in vintage dresses, corsets and ringlets because she moves like a lady from the past, but she seduced “Baby Driver” in waitress clothes.

Born on April 5, 1989, in Esher, a small town in Surrey, in the south-east of England, Lily Chloe Ninette Thomson (her real name) has her acting talent in her family. Her grandmother, Helen Horton, was a prolific actress, voicing Mother the computer in Alien, the Eighth Passenger , and playing an assistant newspaper editor in Superman III . She is also a distant cousin of former President George W. Bush, and Governor Jeb Bush, but politics is not her thing. It was clear to her that what interested her the most was the cinema when she watched Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs with enthusiasm as a child , which made her want to become a Disney princess.

Destined to associate with royalty, at the age of 5 she was chosen to shake hands with Prince Charles of Wales, on a visit to Claremont Park, the area where she lived. As a teenager she joined the National Youth Music Theatre, a young company. “When she was 13 years old we performed in front of the Queen, in a production called“ The Dreaming ”. When we finished we shook his hand.

In 2010 he graduated from Guildhall School, a prestigious institution dedicated to Music and Dramatic Art, in London. After good reviews for roles on the stage at the Young Vic Theatre, and several British series, he was signed to Hollywood for Wrath of the Titans , where he played Korrina, servant of the goddess Andromeda, who helped Perseus, played by Sam Worthington , to search for his father, the captive Zeus, who was Liam Neeson .

In that one she did not go unnoticed, despite the brevity of her role, but she attracted more attention when she broke into the Downton Abbey mansion , in the last episode of the third series, as Lady Rose, the rebellious cousin of the Crawley sisters.   In view of her pull, Julian Fellowes , creator of his country’s biggest television hit in decades, decided to keep her character in the fourth and fifth seasons. She stood out so much that she was immediately raffled off for the movies, but although she left the series, she returned for the final chapter.

She went to the casting for Cinderella , finally a production by her beloved Walt Disney, to play one of the stepsisters. But Kenneth Branagh liked how she looked on camera so much that he recruited her to play her lead. After the triumph of Maleficent , here the producer was right, even more if possible, by maintaining more or less the same plot as his cartoon classic. It was so successful with audiences that the company launched a barrage of similar films.

She gave a feminist touch to the character. “She’s not waiting for the prince to come and rescue her, they both know each other as equals.” Filming her was for her as if she had become a character in a fairy tale from her childhood. “The dance scene with the prince was the most magical moment of my entire life,” she recalls. “Six thousand lit candles, six hundred people surrounding us, a fairy tale dress and overwhelming music. She knew that he was on the set and that he was working, but for a few minutes it was nice to forget him ”. Fiction merged with real life when she began a genuine affair with her Prince Charming, Matt Smith , of Doctor Who fame , and later Duke of Edinburgh in The Crown .

The director reinstated her to interpret Shakespeare ‘s Juliet in the theater . It is not strange, because Lily James hits the classic characters of the time. She proved it as a perfect Elizabeth Bennet, in Pride + Prejudice + Zombies , too bad this mix of the Jane Austen novel with the undead wasn’t up to the same standard. War and Peace , a miniseries where he gave life to Natasha Rostova, worked   better .

Her compatriot Edgar Wright recruited her to play Deborah, a waitress with the same name as a T-Rex theme song, who impressed Ansel Elgort ‘s introverted, music-loving character, a mugger ‘s chauffeur, in Baby Driver . In The Darkest Hour, he gave life to a character that has become a cliché in the latest Winston Churchill biopics, the young secretary in the service of the Prime Minister (in this case, the Oscar-winning Gary Oldman ), who suffers from his grumpy character, but He ends up conquering her heart. In Mamma Mia! Over and over again , continuation of the musical with songs by Abba, she has been chosen to give life to the character of Meryl Streepas a young woman, and in the film version of Mary Ann Shaffer ‘s novel   The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society,  she played Juliet, a writer in search of a plot for her next book in London after World War II.

Despite the fact that she and Smith are one of the most famous and persecuted couples in the UK press, she assures that when she walks around dressed in street clothes, they hardly recognize her. “I’m very normal. In my spare time I hang out with my friends, I play with my cat. And I sing, I sing whenever I’m happy”. Her favorite line from Cinderella defines her: “I’m not a princess, I’m just a girl.”