CV: Gemma Arterton

With Gemma, 34, currently starring as Sister Clodagh in the BBC drama Black Narcissus (9pm, BBC1), we look at the life and career of the British actress so far… ● Gemma was born in Gravesend, Kent, on February 2, 1986. She grew up on a council estate with her mum, Sally-anne, and her younger sister, Hannah, who is also an actress, best-known for Harlan Coben’s

The Five (2016) and Safe (2018). ● Inspired to train as an actor after a starring amateur stage role at school (in Alan Ayckbourn’s

The Boy Who Fell Into A Book), Gemma won a scholarship to Rada. ● Prior to graduating from Rada in 2008, Gemma made her professional stage debut in Shakespeare’s Love’s

Labour’s Lost at the Globe and her film debut in St Trinian’s, as head girl Kelly, both in 2007. But it was her role as Bond girl Strawberry Fields in Quantum Of Solace (2008) that put her on the map.

● Keen to avoid being stuck in ‘decorative

roles’, she starred in indie thriller The

Disappearance Of Alice Creed (2009), and in two adaptations of books by Posy Simmonds: Tamara Drewe (2010) and Gemma Bovery (2014) – for the latter, she learned to speak French. ● downbeat More recently, drama she The starred Escape in the (2017), played the writer Vita Sackville-west in Vita & Virginia (2018), and took the lead as a spirited recluse in the wartime drama Summerland (2020).