Known for her talent on screen, Carey Mulligan has been quietly making a powerful impact on Hollywood since a young age. This year Mulligan stars in Promising Young Woman, landing her second Academy Award nomination. Here are five facts you might not know about this accomplished actress.
Her parents met working in hotels, and she grew up in different hotels.
Mulligan’s parents met while both working hotel jobs. Her father’s hotel management work led to Mulligan being brought up in a variety of different hotel apartments for the first eight years of her life. When Mulligan was three, they relocated to Düsseldorf, Germany. Mulligan told Vogue that “they spoke German, played in the laundry rooms, lost guinea pigs behind radiators, and ate Wiener schnitzel from room service.” When Mulligan was six, her older brother Owain was cast in a school production of The King and I, and the family went to observe a rehearsal. Mulligan instantly fell in love with acting and repeatedly asked to be let in the show until she eventually was: “I think I stamped my feet a little bit, and they let me in.”
She got her first film role in Pride & Prejudice from writing a letter.
Mulligan’s first major film role was playing Kitty Bennet in Pride & Prejudice alongside Keira Knightley and Judi Dench. However, her path to the part wasn’t easy. Mulligan’s family was not originally supportive of her acting career, leading the aspiring actress to seek out her own connections. After attending a lecture from screenwriter Julian Fellowes, Mulligan briefly talked to him and asked for advice on an acting career to which he suggested she “marry a lawyer.” She later sent Fellowes a letter expressing her determination, and he connected her to an assistant casting for Pride & Prejudice. The rest is history.
She made her breakthrough U.S. stage performance on Broadway.
Mulligan made a memorable Broadway debut starring in Anton Chekov’s The Seagull opposite Kristin Scott Thomas who described Mulligan as “the next generation of young actresses, she’s fantastic.” Mulligan brought an artistic approach to preparing for the role: “I made a book full of quotes, pictures, and poetry for Nina, as if it were my university thesis, my qualification for playing the part.” She was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for her performance and The Daily Telegraph said her performance was “quite extraordinarily radiating” and The Observer called her “almost unbearably affecting.”
She is an ambassador for Warchild UK.
Mulligan is passionate about bringing attention to the plight of refugee children worldwide. Her brother served in the army in Afghanistan and worked with War Child UK to facilitate funding of a girls’ school in a conflict area, which got her interested in the organization. Mulligan accompanied War Child on a service trip to Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and she became an ambassador for the organization shortly after. “There’s something sort of fundamental that changes in the way you view children when you have one yourself,” Mulligan told Time. “It makes me wince to think of my daughter experiencing even an iota of the things that [refugee children] have been through.”
Her latest Academy-Award nominated film is making history.
Earning her second Academy Award Best Actress nomination, Mulligan stars in the dark comedy Promising Young Woman. The film made history scoring five Oscars nominations: picture, editing and actress with director Emerald Fennell becoming the first British woman to be nominated for Best Director. When discussing the film with The Irish Times, Mulligan asserted her drive to what she looks for in a script like Promising Young Woman: “At this stage I just want to play women that feel real. I think real-life women are so under-represented in cinema, especially in the last 20 years or so. I keep getting asked: is it getting better for women? I genuinely think that there’s more great writing for women around now than at any time since I started acting. But there’s still a scarcity of female roles that I look at on-screen and think: oh yeah, I feel like I know what you’re going through; you’re not perfect and you’re not unwaveringly supporting your genius husband. There’s not many of those parts around.”
Learn more about Carey Mulligan and her family in My Grandparent’s War premiering on Sunday, April 25. We follow Mulligan as she travels to Japan to learn about her grandfather’s experience as a British naval officer during WWII, including the aircraft attack he survived.
