Why Aled’s girl is Hollywood’s next big thing
SHE must be walking in the air, for singer Aled Jones’s teenage daughter is being feted as the next Hollywood hotshot.
Emilia Jones, 19, has been named as 2022’s Breakout Star To Watch by Vogue magazine. It follows the acclaim she has received for her appearance in the US film CODA.
It won her a Hollywood Music In Media Award (HMMA) for best musical performance in a film. She plays an aspiring singer who is a child of deaf adults or CODA. As the only hearing member of the family, she has to help run their fishing business in Massachusetts.
Miss Jones, whose father also found fame as a teenager when he topped the charts in 1984 with his version of Walking In The Air from animated film The Snowman, made her stage debut in 2011 aged nine in the musical Shrek, alongside Amanda Holden. Her film debut was the same year in Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides and her first starring role was in the 2016 western Brimstone.
For CODA, she had to take singing lessons and learn American Sign Language – as well as how to master a New England accent and skipper a fishing boat.
‘I hadn’t really sung professionally when I sent in my audition tape,’ she told Vogue. ‘I’m also British, didn’t know how to fish and didn’t know any sign language.’
In August, Miss Jones told the Daily Mail that, despite her father’s success as a singer and TV presenter, her ‘heart was always in acting’. Her mother Claire Fossett is a former trapeze artist.