Carey Mulligan

Carey Mulligan (born May 28, 1985, London, England) is a British actress who won critical acclaim and respect for her seemingly effortless ability to inhabit an eclectic variety of characters on screen and stage. Her notable film roles include An Education (2009), Promising Young Woman (2021), and Maestro (2024), each of which earned her an Academy Award nomination for best actress.

Childhood

Mulligan’s mother was a university lecturer and her father an executive in a hotel conglomerate. She spent part of her childhood in Germany and part in London. She became enamored of acting as a small child, and she was enthusiastically involved in the drama department at Woldenham School in Surrey, the all-girls Roman Catholic school where she received her secondary-school education. Over her parents’ objection, she chose not to attend university in favor of acting, in spite of failing to gain entrance to several drama schools.

Early career

Mulligan’s first professional role was as a narcoleptic teen in a 2004 production of Forty Winks at the Royal Court Theatre in London. Through producer Julian Fellowes, who had given a lecture at Woldenham School while she was attending, Mulligan secured an introduction to a casting assistant, which resulted in her being cast in the minor role of Kitty Bennet in the film Pride & Prejudice (2005), starring Keira Knightley and based on the Jane Austen novel. Also in 2005 she played the orphan Ada in the acclaimed BBC miniseries Bleak House, an adaptation of the Charles Dickens novel. She appeared in other TV shows and movies over the next two years, including the TV movie Northanger Abbey (2007), based on another Austen novel. In addition, Mulligan won praise for her performance in a 2007 revival of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull at the Royal Court and won further acclaim when the show transferred to Broadway in 2008.

Discover the fascinating events that shaped the world, straight from our editors.

SIGN UP

By clicking “Sign Up”, you consent to the Britannica Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

Britannica Quiz

Pop Culture Quiz

An Education, Never Let Me Go, and Drive

Mulligan starred in two films in 2009, the melodrama The Greatest and the coming-of-age story An Education. In the latter movie her luminous portrayal of a teenage girl who is seduced by a man in his 30s earned her a BAFTA Award for leading actress and an Academy Award nomination and drew comparisons to Audrey Hepburn. Mulligan then played the daughter of Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps and starred with Knightley in Never Let Me Go (both 2010), the film adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel. In 2011 Mulligan appeared opposite Ryan Gosling in the thriller Drive and took on the difficult role of the emotionally damaged sister of a sex addict (Michael Fassbender) in Steve McQueen’s grim Shame.

The Great Gatsby, Inside Llewyn Davis, and Mudbound

Mulligan earned praise for her performance as Daisy Buchanan in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby and as a singer in the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis (both 2013). The following year she starred with Bill Nighy in a revival of Skylight in London’s West End, and, when the play transferred to Broadway in 2015, Mulligan was nominated for a Tony Award. Her 2015 movies were the period dramas Far from the Madding Crowd and Suffragette. She later acted in the acclaimed drama Mudbound (2017), about racism in World War II-era Mississippi.

Promising Young Woman, Maestro, and Beef

Mulligan played a wife whose husband all but abandons her in Paul Dano’s critically praised Wildlife (2019). Her complex performance of a woman avenging her best friend’s assault by targeting men willing to take advantage of an inebriated woman in Promising Young Woman (2020), written and directed by Emerald Fennell, earned her a best-actress Oscar nomination. She next portrayed a widow in Suffolk living on what proves to be the major archaeological find of Sutton Hoo in The Dig (2021).

In 2022 Mulligan portrayed journalist Megan Twohey in She Said (2022), a dramatization of the newspaper reporting that exposed the crimes of film producer Harvey Weinstein and contributed to the Me Too movement. The following year Mulligan again worked with Fennell, on Saltburn, an acid drama about a striving young man (Barry Keoghan) who targets an aristocratic British family. In 2023 Mulligan played Felicia Montealegre, the wife of American composer Leonard Bernstein, in the biopic Maestro, for which she earned her third Academy Award nomination for best actress.

Explore Britannica Premium!

The trusted destination for professionals, college students, and lifelong learners.

SUBSCRIBE

In 2024 Mulligan starred as a wife left behind by her astronaut husband (Adam Sandler) in the existential sci-fi drama Spaceman. Two years later she appeared alongside Oscar Isaac, Cailee Spaeny, and Charles Melton in the second season of the critically acclaimed Netflix series Beef.

Personal life

In 2012 Mulligan married Marcus Mumford, a songwriter who leads the British folk-rock band Mumford & Sons. The couple has three children. In 2025 Mulligan was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE).