Carey Mulligan (born May 28, 1985, London, England) is a British actress who won critical acclaim and respect for her seemingly effortless ability to inhabit an eclectic variety of characters on screen and stage.

Mulligan’s mother was a university lecturer and her father an executive in a hotel conglomerate. She spent part of her childhood in Germany and part in London. She became enamoured of acting as a small child, and she was enthusiastically involved in the drama department at Woldenham School in Surrey, the all-girls Roman Catholic school where she received her secondary-school education. Over her parents’ objection, she chose not to attend university in favour of acting, in spite of failing to gain entrance to several drama schools.

Mulligan’s first professional role was as a narcoleptic teen in a 2004 production of Forty Winks at the Royal Court Theatre in London. Through producer Julian Fellowes, who had given a lecture at Woldenham School while she was attending, Mulligan secured an introduction to a casting assistant, which resulted in her being cast in the minor role of Kitty Bennet in the film Pride & Prejudice (2005), starring Keira Knightley and based on the Jane Austen novel. Also in 2005 she played the orphan Ada in the acclaimed BBC miniseries Bleak House, an adaptation of the Charles Dickens novel. She appeared in other TV shows and movies over the next two years. In addition, Mulligan won praise for her performance in a 2007 revival of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull at the Royal Court and won further acclaim when the show transferred to Broadway in 2008.

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Mulligan starred in two films in 2009, the melodrama The Greatest and the coming-of-age story An Education. In the latter movie her luminous portrayal of a teenage girl who is seduced by a man in his 30s earned an Academy Award nomination and drew comparisons to Audrey Hepburn. Mulligan then played the daughter of Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps and starred with Knightley in Never Let Me Go (both 2010), the film adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel. In 2011 Mulligan appeared opposite Ryan Gosling in the thriller Drive and took on the difficult role of the emotionally damaged sister of a sex addict (Michael Fassbender) in Steve McQueen’s grim Shame.

Mulligan earned praise for her performance as Daisy Buchanan in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby and as a singer in the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis (both 2013). The following year she starred with Bill Nighy in a revival of Skylight in London’s West End, and, when the play transferred to Broadway in 2015, Mulligan was nominated for a Tony Award. Her 2015 movies were the period dramas Far from the Madding Crowd and Suffragette. She later acted in the acclaimed drama Mudbound (2017), about racism in World War II-era Mississippi.

Mulligan played a wife whose husband all but abandons her in Paul Dano’s critically praised Wildlife (2019). Her complex performance of a woman avenging her best friend’s assault by targeting men willing to take advantage of an inebriated woman in Promising Young Woman (2020) earned her a best-actress Oscar nomination. She next portrayed a widow in Suffolk living on what proves to be a major archaeological find in The Dig (2021).