Vanessa Kirby, the multifaceted career of a discreet star

Since she began acting, Vanessa Kirby’s second home has been the theater. Theater critics immediately surrendered to the talent of the British actress in 2010, when she starred in four different plays, including Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts, William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, the play that earned her the Young Promise award at the Manchester Evening News Theatre Awards (MENTA). At barely 20 years of age, far from being intimidated by the demands and expectations of this type of work, she grew up and began to line up one job after another. The intimacy of the theater soon gave way to British television and then film, where she has demonstrated her range as an actress. Nominated for major awards, the 35-year-old performer continues to reap professional success in 2024, but Kirby’s discretion prevails over her multifaceted career and we still don’t know much about the actress.

She’s not getting carried away by the wave of success currently propelling her career, and she claims to be well aware of the ups and downs of her profession. “The industry is so transient, you can be working all year round or have massive breaks, and most of the career is getting lots of nos. Fear and doubt is always going to be there, no matter what,” she told the British edition of Harper’s Bazaar magazine in July. But fear or no fear, it is certain that the foundations of Kirby’s career are becoming sturdier every day.

Her ability to shine at work seems to run in her family. The actress is the daughter of Roger Kirby, a renowned prostate surgeon, researcher, writer, and president of the Royal Society of Medicine. Her mother, Jane Kirby, was the editor of Country Living magazine for years. Her brother Joe is a renowned teacher and the co-founder of Michaela Community School, a free school noted for being one of England’s top schools for the GCSEs (national exams taken by pupils aged 14 and over). Her sister Juliet, a theater agent, works in a profession closer to Vanessa’s. Despite being born into a very well-to-do family, Kirby’s childhood wasn’t easy. In a 2018 interview in The Guardian, she recounted that the theater became her lifeline when she was bullied at school. I was quite badly bullied for a few years. […] It was systematic. Quite awful. A teacher said to my mum on my very last day of school: ‘She survived it. She’s done it,’ which means they knew it was happening,” she revealed.

Life after Netflix

In 2016, after spending several years in the theater, Kirby was cast in The Crown, which brought her almost instant stardom. Her relative anonymity vanished when she took the role of Princess Margaret in the first two seasons of the Netflix blockbuster, one of the platform’s most successful shows. The impossible story of Queen Elizabeth II’s sister and army captain Peter Townsend earned the actress her first Emmy Award nomination and two TV BAFTA nominations, an award she won in 2018. For a time, she combined her work on the small screen with theater. Her passion for the stage gave her enough energy to rehearse Chekhov’s play Uncle Vanya after marathon days of filming the series. Also in 2016, Kirby made her Broadway debut in A Streetcar Named Desire, a play she had already done to great acclaim in London two years earlier.

The Crown was Kirby’s last television project to date, but not her first. Like many young British actresses, Kirby has participated in numerous period productions for the small screen, including the miniseries Great Expectations, which the BBC broadcast in 2011, and in The Frankenstein Chronicles, inspired by Mary Shelley’s famous novel, in 2015.

Kirby’s film career underscores the versatility of an actress who has proven herself adept in all genres, whether it’s a period drama, a sci-fi title or a multimillion-dollar action film. Recently, she has played small supporting roles in blockbuster romantic films, such as About Time (Richard Curtis, 2013) and Me Before You (Thea Sharrock, 2016); transformed into Zelda Fitzgerald, in Genius (Michael Grandage, 2016); turned into a cyborg in the sci-fi film Kill Command (Steven Gomez, 2016); and played an arms dealer and the scourge of Tom Cruise’s character in Mission: Impossible – Fallout (Christopher McQuarrie, 2018). In 2023, she reprised her role and costarred again with Cruise in the franchise’s seventh installment, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, released in 2023. She told Variety how impressed she was by the actor’s commitment to the film (he shoots all the action scenes himself without stuntmen): “That kind of belief in cinema and what one could achieve and his passion for it is so inspiring. He kind of believes he can do the impossible and then he does… I love being a part of the franchise. I’m really excited to come back.” Kirby will also appear in the next installment in 2025.

There is no impossible challenge

Kirby’s work in Mission Impossible got her noticed and led to a new job opportunity in another successful blockbuster franchise. In 2019, she joined the cast of Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw, alongside Dwayne Johnson, Jason Statham, Idris Elba and Eiza Gonzalez. Her next role, which ended up consolidating her place as one of the best actresses of her generation, was completely different from that of an MI6 spy. In 2020, she starred in Pieces of a Woman (directed by Hungarian Kornél Mundruczó and co-produced by Martin Scorsese), an intimate drama in which Kirby’s character confronts the loss of her baby, born at home, and the subsequent negligence trial against the midwife responsible for the delivery. The actress grew with this tragic story in which she could display her talent for drama, which had won her praise when she started in the theater. While in Mission Impossible she underwent intense physical training, for the preparation of this film she had “the absolute privilege of watching someone give birth for that movie — my God, I was in awe,” she told Vanity Fair. Her heartbreaking performance earned her nominations for almost every award that season, including the Oscar and Golden Globe. In the end, she won the Volpi Cup for best actress at the Venice Film Festival.

Even in the midst of the awards campaign, Kirby tried to limit her media exposure. After the success of Pieces of a Woman, she starred in several independent films and kept a low profile prior to the intense promotional campaign for Napoleon. In director Ridley Scott’s film about the French strategist and emperor, Kirby once again captivated critics with her performance as Josephine Bonaparte. And she was a rebound addition to the cast, after actress Jodie Comer had to turn down the role due to scheduling problems. Accustomed to playing historical characters, she recognizes the added responsibility of such a role: “You’re not inventing their history, their lives, their childhood, their background, and their psyche. You are trying to accurately embody someone that really has lived, and lived such an extraordinary life that’s really, really far from any of ours or anything that I could relate it to personally,” she reflected in a chat with Deadline.

The actress has a busy year ahead. In addition to the new Mission Impossible, we will see her co-star with Ana de Armas, Sydney Sweeney and Jude Law in Eden, directed by Ron Howard and currently shooting. Described by the actress as a “survival thriller,” we know little about the plot, except that it involves a group of people who abandon life in society to go to the Galápagos Islands. Kirby has also just confirmed her participation in Fantastic Four, in which she will play the invisible woman.

Her first television project since The Crown awaits confirmation. Ryan Murphy was reportedly responsible for Kirby’s return to the small screen. The influential creator had her in the new season of Feud, the series that delves into the history of rivalry between different famous characters. The first season recovered the resounding feud between actresses Joan Fontaine and Bette Davis; the second focuses on the confrontation between writer Truman Capote and his high society friends, known as the Swans; and the third installment will address the epic divorce between the extravagant Jocelyn Wildenstein and her husband, businessman and art dealer Alec Wildenstein, the most expensive split in history until Jeff Bezos’s separation.

Beyond acting, the actress co-founded her own production company, Aluna Entertainment, with her sister Juliet in 2021. The goal? To invest in women’s stories as told by women without falling into clichés: “What’s the equivalent of a female Taxi Driver? I feel like the radical thing is for it to be [...] messy, contradictory sort of anti-heroines that aren’t saviors or worthy just because they happen to be women,” she explained to Indie Wire. Whether on screen or behind the scenes, Vanessa Kirby has a lot to say.

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