Rose drops pinny for kiss with Vin
Bewitching new role for Scots star
IT’S a far cry from playing young housemaid Gwen Harding in the first series of Downton Abbey, but Rose Leslie is now a leather-clad leading lady in a Hollywood blockbuster.
The Scots actress has shaken off her costume drama pinny for her first major film role in The Last Witch Hunter, to be released in the UK on Friday.
The 28-year-old redhead from Aberdeenshire, whose father is a clan chief, proves she has what it takes to be a big screen heroine, locking lips with co-star Vin Diesel.
Miss Leslie, known also for her stint as Ygritte in Game Of Thrones, studied at the London Academy Of Music And Dramatic Art and went on to win a Scottish Bafta new talent award.
In The Last Witch Hunter she plays a powerful young witch who joins forces with Diesel’s immortal warrior in a bid to save humanity.
The fantasy film, which also stars Michael Caine and Elijah Wood – best known as Frodo in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy – centres on a plan by the witch covens of New York to unleash a deadly plague on the world.
If the movie is a success, Lionsgate Films has already indicated plans to turn the project into a franchise.
The actress – full name Rose Eleanor Arbuthnot-Leslie – is the daughter of Clan Leslie chieftain Sebastian Arbuthnot-Leslie and was raised at her fami- ly’s 15th Century Lickleyhead Castle ancestral seat in Aberdeenshire.
During interviews she revealed that she enjoyed all the fighting in her role as the good witch Chloe but would not want her power to access other people’s minds, joking: ‘It would make you a paranoid wreck.’
After such excitement she’s now putting on the pinny once more, after five seasons away, for the final series of Downton Abbey.