Gabrielle Donnelly

Being Blunt

The actress Emily Blunt on coping with fame and not speaking American

Emily Blunt is jolly busy. This year, she’s in three movies – Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, with Ewan McGregor; The Five-Year Engagement, with Jason Segel; and the offbeat My Sister’s Sister. Her fans, I tell her, must be really excited.

Emily seems unsure: ‘D’you think so?’ she says, wrinkling her nose. ‘It might be just incredibly boring. I can imagine people’s faces when the next film comes out. “Ugh, not her again!”’

We are having coffee in the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills, Emily and I. Emily looks every inch the movie star in a white pencil skirt and a vintage top. But as it turns out, she isn’t a diva at all. She spends much of the interview sending herself up — not the usual form in filmland.

Which isn’t to suggest that she’s the shy, retiring type. Her self-confidence as an actress was apparent from the start. She burst on to British screens in 2004, all of 21 and smouldering wickedly in Pawel Pawlikowski’s sexy, controversial My Summer of Love. Two years later, she made her mark in Hollywood with The Devil Wears Prada, in which she skeetered and teetered on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and all but stole the movie from Anne Hathaway and even Meryl Streep. Since then, she has attracted public attention and critical acclaim with films of all sizes and budgets, from The Young Victoria to Gnomeo and Juliet.

Emily was born in Roehampton, the second of four children of Oliver Blunt QC and his wife Joanna, an actress turned teacher. Life in the Blunt household was not dull. ‘It was a loud, raucous, very fun household, and my parents were committed to each other and committed to us. It was a very loving environment which was a wonderful thing.

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