Emerald Fennell

Emerald Fennell (born October 1, 1985, London, England) is an English actress, director, and writer known for her versatile talents and her provocative works exploring horror, revenge, gender, and social class. She directed and wrote the films Promising Young Woman (2020), which won her an Academy Award for best original screenplay, and Saltburn (2023). As an actress, Fennell’s most prominent roles include Nurse Patsy Mount in the television series Call the Midwife and Camilla Parker Bowles in Netflix’s The Crown.

Early life

Fennell comes from a family with an impressive creative pedigree and a touch of eccentricity. She was born in the Hammersmith neighborhood of London to screenwriter and novelist Louise (née MacGregor) Fennell and jewelry designer Theo Fennell, whose creations for his celebrity customers, including Lady Gaga, Elton John, and Madonna, earned him the nickname “the King of Bling.” Fennell’s great-great-grandmother Gwendoline Eastlake-Smith was an Olympic tennis champion. Her maternal grandparents, Alasdair and Jenny MacGregor, founded the Society for the Welfare of Horses and Ponies in Wales and lived on a sheep farm there, in Monmouthshire, where they were known for their trips around the area in an old Rolls Royce and for their large menagerie of animals. Fennell and her younger sister, Coco, a fashion designer, grew up dividing their time between the family’s apartment in London’s trendy Chelsea neighborhood and a cottage in the county of Hampshire. As a teenager, Fennell attended Marlborough College, a prestigious boarding school in Wiltshire, where she began acting in school plays.

Fennell continued her education at the University of Oxford, where she studied English. At Oxford, Fennell continued acting in plays, which led to her being discovered by acting agent Lindy King.

Acting career

Fennell’s professional acting career began in 2006, when she appeared in a small role in the television series Trial & Retribution. Other small parts followed, in the series New Tricks and Any Human Heart (both 2010), until she began to garner more attention for her work, in the period dramas Albert Nobbs (2011) and Anna Karenina (2012).

In 2013 Fennell landed the biggest role of her acting career yet, as Nurse Patsy Mount, a lead character in the popular BBC series Call the Midwife. She remained on the cast until 2017. During this time she also appeared in the notable historical film drama The Danish Girl (2015), about Lili Elbe; the action-adventure film Pan (2015); and the TV series Victoria (2017). In 2018 she played painter Vanessa Bell, the elder sister of literary giant Virginia Woolf, in Vita & Virginia, a romantic drama about Woolf and her relationship with the novelist and poet Vita Sackville-West.

In 2019 Fennell joined the cast of the acclaimed British drama The Crown, portraying young Camilla Shand (later Camilla Parker Bowles) in the 1970s, when she first met then Prince Charles—before either of them were married to their first spouses and long before the couple were crowned king and queen of the United Kingdom. Fennell came to the role with a deep respect for Camilla, telling Vogue magazine in 2019, “I wanted to be completely fair and imagine myself in her shoes, which is that of a young woman…who falls in love with someone who has a life that would make your life very, very difficult.” Her performance earned her an Emmy Award nomination in 2021 for outstanding supporting actress in a drama series. In 2023 Fennell had a small but deliciously witty role as the Midge doll in Greta Gerwig’s blockbuster comedy-fantasy Barbie.

Writing career

Fennell published her first book, the children’s ghost story Shiverton Hall in 2013. Inspired by Fennell’s own love for horror books and movies as a child, the book tells the story of a young boy attending a spooky boarding school. Its sequel, The Creeper, was published the following year.

In 2015 Fennell released her third book, the young adult novel Monsters. The mystery horror novel follows two 12-year-olds as they investigate a murder in their small town. In 2016 Fennell’s writing career pivoted to television when she worked on several episodes of Drifters, a sitcom about the ups and downs of three women in their twenties living in the northern English city of Leeds. (Fennell also acted in one episode.) In 2019 she took over for Phoebe Waller-Bridge as the new head writer and executive producer for the award-winning drama series Killing Eve. That year Fennell was nominated for two Emmys for her work on the show, in the categories of outstanding writing in a drama series and outstanding drama series.

Directing career

Fennell made her directorial debut in 2018 with the short film Careful How You Go, a black comedy centering on three femme fatale characters. Two years later she picked up on this same theme and dialed it up several notches for her feature-length film Promising Young Woman, an unsettling story of female revenge. In the film, Carey Mulligan plays a traumatized young woman who plots the ruin of every male sexual predator who crosses her path. The shocking thriller garnered five Academy Award nominations, including for best picture, best director, and best original screenplay. Fennell’s win for her darkly comic screenplay made her the first woman to win an Oscar in any writing category since Diablo Cody’s win for the screenplay of the 2007 film Juno.

In 2023 Fennell directed, produced, and wrote her second feature-length film, Saltburn, which was released in theaters but found a more enthusiastic audience when it was streamed on Amazon Prime. Another wickedly dark comedy but with a gothic flavor, it centers on a shy Oxford student named Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) who is drawn into the world of his fabulously wealthy classmate Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi). Presenting himself to Felix as poor with a tragic home life, Oliver is eventually found out to be not the disadvantaged—or harmless—friend he seems to be. Set mostly in the mid-2000s, the story drew inspiration from Fennell’s experience of attending Oxford in the same era. Saltburn was a commercial hit, sparking conversations about aristocratic privilege and so-called social climbing; yet some critics questioned whether its sharpest satire was aimed at the rich or at the strivers of the working and middle classes. The film received five BAFTA Award nominations, and two of its stars—Keoghan and Rosamund Pike, who plays Felix’s eccentric mother, Elspeth Catton—were nominated for Golden Globe Awards for their performances.