Emily Kathleen A. Mortimer is an English actress. She began performing on stage, and has since appeared in several film and television roles, including 30 Rock, Scream 3, Match Point, Lars and the Real Girl, Hugo, Cars 2, Shutter Island, Harry Brown, Our Idiot Brother, and T...
University of Oxford, Lincoln College, Oxford, St Paul's Girls' School
Nationality
United Kingdom
Spouse
Alessandro Nivola (m. 2003)
Children
May Rose Nivola, Samuel John Nivola
Parents
John Mortimer, Penelope Gollop
Siblings
Rosie Mortimer, Jeremy Mortimer, Ross Bentley, Sally Silverman
Nicknames
Emily Kathleen Mortimer , Emily Kathleen A. Mortimer
Awards
Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Female
Nominations
Satellite Award for Best Supporting Actress – Comedy or Musical, European Film Audience Award for Best Actress, Satellite Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture, Comedy or Musical
Movies
Shutter Island, Match Point, Hugo, Cars 2, Lars and the Real Girl, Our Idiot Brother, Lovely and Amazing, Young Adam, Transsiberian, The Pink Panther, The Pink Panther 2, Harry Brown, Dear Frankie, The 51st State, Spectral, Disney's The Kid, The Sleeping Dictionary, Redbelt, Howl's Moving Castle, No...
TV Shows
Doll & Em, The Newsroom, The Glass Virgin, No Bananas
Star Sign
Sagittarius
#
Trademark
1
high meek voice
#
Quote
1
[on Martin Scorsese] He gives you license to find the lights and darks in a character.
2
But, yes, no matter how in character actresses are in a film, the moment they take off their clothes, you start wondering about them as a person. You start checking them out, in a way. It's a self-conscious moment for both the audience and for the actor and always, I think, slightly embarrassing.
3
The preparation for a film is so ephemeral and hard -- you're lucky if you get a day of rehearsal or a chat with the director or actors on set. You really don't know what to do. Accents are very tangible, blessedly, and if you have to do one, it's a way of getting into character. I can read it through a few times and pretend I know what I'm doing!
4
I wasn't prepared for the inexplicable, overwhelming feeling of love and protection, or how hard it would be to have to leave this little thing in the morning. The good thing about movies is that while you work hard for three or four months, you can have three months or so off afterward. Hopefully, it all works out. I'm trying to avoid, you know, guilt, even though before the child is born, you're already thinking you're doing things wrong. . . . Why do I think that will probably carry over until the day you die? [on having her son]
5
...you can imagine, or think you can imagine, how to play almost anything - a drug addict, a bank robber, a killer - but the imagination doesn't prepare you for being a mother and those particular feelings.
6
...acting was something I pretended I didn't want to do as I was growing up.
7
I want any excuse to come home. My dad is not a spring chicken any more. If anyone says, go buy a postage stamp in London, I'll go and do it.
8
It doesn't feel like that. The big producers still want Kate Winslet and Kate Beckinsale, I suppose. - on whether she has made it into mainstream Hollywood.
9
Until Frankie [Dear Frankie (2004)], I didn't realise that feeling part of a film was about staying up late, getting drunk, smoking and all that. And I wasn't doing it, obviously; or if I did, I felt wracked with guilt about it. That was odd. It felt much more like a job of work.
10
I have to say that, though it sounds so superficial, the accent really does help. I like having accents preparing for a part. It's a hard thing to do, to be given a script, and know that you've got to turn up on the first day of the shoot - generally without having had any rehearsal - and present a character. It's really baffling; it's incredibly hard to know how to begin, to approach it, other than just thinking about it. But how do you think about it? There's no guidebook.
11
To be in the hands of an auteur like [Andrei Tarkovsky], that would be just brilliant. But I don't know if those kind of films can ever be made any more. To get art nowadays, in cinema or books or anything, that grapples with the possibility of a meaningless universe . . . it just doesn't happen any more. In even the most indie of the indie films, everything has to come to some kind of neat conclusion. But that's part of the problem with politics and history and everything today, that people think there's a right and a wrong, a good and a bad . . . maybe there just isn't . . . .
12
This is not meant to have happened to me at all. I am a Sloane, from the Chilterns.
Was chosen to voice the young Sophie in the English language version of Howl's Moving Castle (2004) because the producers felt that her voice resembled that of the young Jean Simmons, who voiced the old Sophie.
11
Educated at the prestigious St Paul's Girls School in London. Was in the same class as fellow actress Rachel Weisz.
12
Fluent in Russian
13
The name of her mother, Penelope, was also the name of her father's first wife.
14
Attended Moscow Arts Theatre School.
15
Attended St. Paul's Girls' School in London.
16
Lives in Los Angeles, California, USA. [2004]
17
Discovered an older half-brother, Ross Bentley, as a result of a past relationship between actress Wendy Craig and her father Sir John Mortimer. [September 2004]