Meet the comic who’s far from a ‘nobody’

It’s been a while since Anna Kendrick was the ‘scrappy little nobody’ of her memoir’s title. Today, the 31-year-old actress and singer is best known for her starring role as Beca, the rebel songstress in the a capella-themed film series, Pitch Perfect. Before that came supporting roles in Up In The Air (she snagged an Academy Award nomination for that one) and the Twilight franchise.

Her roots are in musical theatre, though. She was just 12 years old when she won her first Broadway role – and with it a Tony nomination. By 17, she’d left high school and was starring alongside Claire Bloom in a New York City Opera production of Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music.

Nevertheless, the title of her book isn’t quite the humble-brag it seems. Kendrick grew up modestly in Portland, Maine, where it didn’t always seem as if a career in showbiz was on the cards. As a fiveyear-old Shirley Temple lookalike, she ended up face down on the stage at her first dance class recital.

An ‘obstinate, determined little ball of anxiety’, she was small for her age and stayed that way, but if looking like a ten-year old as a teenager became a massive professional asset, it was also a source of crippling insecurity in the high school world of first crushes.

That’s what this chatty, surprisingly shrewd book excels at: balancing the glamour with the grit to endearing effect. Because it takes a lot of grit to make it as an actor, even if you were on Broadway before you hit puberty.

And, by the way, it’s hilarious. Kendrick’s salty plain-spokenness makes mincemeat of child actors (‘f***ing weirdos’), exes (‘Let’s be real: he had a pulse and he wanted to be my boyfriend’) and Alexa Chung (‘known for wearing clothes really well’). She also dishes on kissing scenes (‘totally clinical’), niceness (on set, its opposite is not mean but ‘difficult’ – especially if you’re a woman) and sex (‘I barrelled through every cliché, and it turned out a lot of it wasn’t that sexy, but we both pretended that it was’).

She may no longer be a nobody, but she’s as scrappy as ever, and if that makes her likeable on screen, it makes her downright lovable on the page.