Vanessa Kirby: meet south-west London's hottest export

A string of dazzling stage performances has made her one of London’s most exciting and in-demand young actresses. Now, with two blockbuster films out, and starring roles in Netflix’s The Crown and Uncle Vanya at the Almeida, Vanessa Kirby is about to hit  the big time. Patricia Nicol meets a star in the making
Cover photograph of Vanessa Kirby by Jane McLeish-Kelsey. Styled by Sophie Paxton. Coat, £1,575, Joseph
Patricia Nicol14 January 2016

Should this summer’s Absolutely Fabulous movie prove such a smash that there is demand for a prequel, Vanessa Kirby would be dream casting as the young Patsy Stone. Like Joanna Lumley, she’s effusive, endearingly eccentric, a bit posh and whip-smart.

The 27-year-old rising star makes a dramatic entrance to the Primrose Hill café where her people have suggested we meet. Careering through the door, trailing multiple bags, a vision of tawny blonde hair, honeyed skin and cream cashmere atop coltish legs, she strides towards me, crying, ‘Oh, look at you. Aren’t you lovely?’ Caught in the spotlight of her start-lingly blue gaze, I hover by the table, panicked yet tickled by the thought that she might be about to pinch my cheek. Instead she shoos away a proffered handshake to envelop me in a warm embrace. I emerge disarmed and charmed in equal measure.‘I’ve always been overly familiar with people,’ she later confesses.

‘I just love people. I love them a lot.’ Is she a people-watcher? ‘No, I’m straight in there, full throttle. I doubt myself a lot, but go forward at full throttle anyway.’ I had worried that the bustling café would be too distracting a place in which to conduct an interview. Yet from the second Kirby sits down, she commands your full attention. You have to concentrate, too, because Kirby, a darling of London’s most radical young stage directors, often speaks in an enthusiastic but inchoate stream of consciousness. Overlapping ideas are pounced on, mulled over, forgotten, then much later looped back to. ‘I love the idea of being an Aries,’ she offers up at one point, before adding: ‘My friends, who all call me Noo, think I operate on another planet.’

Jumper, £79, COS (cosstores.com)

Certainly, this year promises to be a stellar one: a showcase for her dazzling versatility. On stage she will play Elena in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya at the Almeida, and make her Broadway debut when she and Gillian Anderson reprise their roles as Stella and Blanche DuBois in the production of A Streetcar Named Desire that brought them acclaim at the Young Vic in 2014. On screen she will be seen as Zelda Fitzgerald in Michael Grandage’s debut film Genius, a kickass cyborg-like anti-heroine working for an arms manufacturer in the dystopian thriller Kill Command, and as the young Princess Margaret in the Netflix series The Crown.

Uncle Vanya, which opens next month, will see her star alongside her good friend Jessica Brown Findlay. She will play the alluring Elena to Brown Findlay’s put-upon Sonya, in a contemporary staging, adapted and directed by the wunderkind Robert Icke.

Kirby leaped at the chance to work with Icke, 28, who recently won Best Director at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards for his arresting vision of Oresteia. ‘Rob is so intelligent and brave and cool and pierces straight through to the truth of something so quickly,’ she enthuses. ‘I try to summarise what I think about something in these big, huge rambling essays and he says, “What you actually mean is…” and sums it all up in just three words. And I’m, like, “Rob, how do you do that?” ’

They had met for tea a couple of times to discuss work. ‘Then a text arrived, saying, “Uncle Vanya? Elena? You fancy it?” ’ she recalls. ‘And I went, “Are you f***ing kidding me? A hundred million per cent yes.” ’

And so it is that Kirby will sometimes arrive for daytime rehearsals for Uncle Vanya having already done a few ‘crazy hours’ filming’ for The Crown. It is a pattern of work she is growing accustomed to: when we meet she has already been up for 13 hours. At 4.45am she was whisked from Tooting Bec, where she lives with her younger sister and two schoolfriends, to shoot The Crown at Knebworth. The day is yet young — she’s out that evening for a cast-and-crew bash at Skye Gyngell’s Spring at Somerset House.

The Crown is a huge deal. Netflix’s much-anticipated, big-budget first British series, due to air in September, is scripted by Peter Morgan (The Queen, The Audience, Frost/Nixon, Rush), with some episodes directed by Stephen Daldry. In the first two series — six are hoped for, to take the Royal Family up to the present day — she plays the skittish Princess Margaret from the ages of 18 to 25. Claire Foy plays the young Queen Elizabeth, with Matt Smith as Prince Philip. ‘They already feel like family.’

Brought up in Wimbledon in a middle-class family, Kirby never had much interest in the Royals. Her father is a celebrated prostate surgeon. Her mother is a former magazine editor, a founder of Country Living, who now looks after his private practice’s corporate affairs. ‘I’m so fascinated by the psychology of being born into a life like Margaret’s,’ Kirby says. ‘Palace life is a completely different reality from anything any of us have known. It’s like nothing we could have imagined — it could almost be a film set on a spaceship.’

She sees parallels in the two parts she will juggle until filming on the first series of The Crown ends in February. In Uncle Vanya, Elena is the glamorous, dissatisfied, languorous young wife everyone else projects fantasies on to. A whole nation invested their dreams in the pretty young Elizabeth Taylor-like Princess Margaret, who, Kirby believes, ‘wanted for nothing in life, except emotionally: your dad dies, your mum’s in mourning, your sister becomes queen and you’re increasingly sidelined’.

Jumper, £745, and skirt, £345, Barbara Casasola at net-a-porter.com

Her story in The Crown will focus on Margaret’s doomed love affair with the divorced Group Captain Peter Townsend. ‘I feel people naturally have a brightness,’ says Kirby. ‘When that is extinguished by circumstances — be it a wrong marriage, or a situation that you cannot leave psychologically — there’s something about that dying spark that I’m drawn to playing.’

Kirby used to step out with the pillow-lipped Douglas Booth, Pip to her Estella in the BBC’s 2011 adaptation of Great Expectations. She is currently single. ‘Though I’m not meant to talk about my personal life,’ she chides good-naturedly. When we meet, shortly before Christmas, she has plans to see in the New Year volunteering overnight at a soup kitchen. ‘I can’t think of anything better right now,’ she says. ‘We’ll be there right through until 6am — it’s somewhere like Tottenham, I think.’

Kirby’s fun, ditzy, dizzy blondeness is, of course, barely half the story. After a serious-sounding ‘but formative’ year out partly spent studying conflict resolution in South Africa, she read English at Exeter, gaining a First. ‘I was quite surprised,’ she says. ‘I did go out a lot. And I was in tons of plays. I must have caught up in my third year massively.’

Is she someone who works hard at things? ‘Yeah, I think so,’ she begins hesitatingly. ‘Yeah, I am, but this is another thing: I wouldn’t have thought I was. I like to pretend I’m not the type of person to care an awful lot, when actually I am. I used to be a massive worrier and that’s something I’m trying to let go of.’

She says meditating helps her stay grounded. ‘I remember seeing someone meditating on a train when I was really young and thinking, “What a weirdo,” ’ she says. ‘But actually it’s just having that head space.’

Does she exercise her body, too? ‘I go for a run now and again, and I like a bit of yoga, but mostly I can’t be bothered. It’s the same with my friends like Jess [Brown Findlay], Holly Grainger and Lily James, who is a really good friend — they don’t give a shit. I do try to look after myself mentally because in our culture so much of the focus is on the external. When I first started doing screen work I thought, “I’m not beautiful enough for this profession — all the actresses I watch on screen are gorgeous and beautiful goddesses, but I’m just a scrawny, scruffy girl from South West London.” But you have to really empower yourself. And this is another thing I really believe: what your insides are doing your outside reflects and what you give to yourself you can give to others.’

It’s Kirby’s acting that has kept her in work ever since she by-passed a postgraduate drama course to join the company of the Octagon Theatre, Bolton. In 2011, she was nominated for Outstanding Newcomer at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards for her role in The Acid Test at the Royal Court and won rave reviews playing Masha in Chekhov’s Three Sisters at the Young Vic in 2012. Genius will premiere at the Berlin Film Festival in February. In April Streetcar begins its Broadway run. ‘Oh God, the idea of going over there and doing American accents,’ she groans, then perks up at the prospect of hanging out with her ‘other sister’ Anderson in Brooklyn. Later this year there’s Kill Command. ‘Rarely for an action film, my female character, Mills, is right at its centre.’

Her inspiration came in 2000, when her parents took her to the National Theatre to see The Cherry Orchard with Vanessa and the late Corin Redgrave. The latter had been treated by Kirby’s father and afterwards they visited him backstage. ‘But no one in my family had ever acted,’ she says.

People to watch in 2016

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At her private school, Lady Eleanor Holles in Hampton, she felt a sensitive, emotional outsider. During her year out she was beaten up by another student. ‘She was very drunk, I think,’ says Kirby, who has clearly moved on. She says her sister and ‘best friend forever’ Juliet, a theatrical agent, and her brother Joe, an assistant headteacher at the Wembley free school set up by the outspoken educationalist Katharine Birbalsingh, are ‘far more chilled’.

Her parents’ focus was always on achievement, not entitlement. They themselves come from relatively humble backgrounds. ‘They both have amazing discipline and my mum especially is incredibly hot on the importance of being independent. She’s incredibly grounding.’

Does Kirby ever worry that the work will dry up? ‘No, I have a real faith in what women are doing at the moment,’ she says. ‘People want to watch women more and read women more. If something’s not happening, then we’re going to make it happen.’ She’s not just a star of the future, but a forward-looking one, too. ESUncle Vanya is at the Almeida from 5 February to 26 March

Portraits by Jane mcLeish-Kelsey, styled by Sophie Paxton (almeida.co.uk)

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