Carey Mulligan was born on 28th May 1985 in London, England. The British actress won global acclaim for her Oscar-nominated portrayal of teenage wild child Jenny Miller in the coming-of age-drama An Education.She landed the role, based on the autobiographic memoir of British journalist Lynn Barber, after praise for her acting debut as Kitty Bennett in Pride & Prejudice in 2005.
For the following eight years she and her brother lived in a series of upmarket hotels and was educated at the International School of Düsseldorf in Germany before returning to the UK where she went to Woldingham School in Surrey.After an early interest in the academic side of school, Mulligan - who admits she had been quite "strait-laced" - became more interested in acting after seeing her brother perform in a school production of The King.
Her mother, who had taken her from the age of fourteen to see Broadway shows while in New York, enouraged her to study at Reading University in England.However, Mulligan claims that, before she began professionally acting, she had once "secretly" applied to and been rejected by three drama schools on her university application form.Passing up on the opportunity to go to university, she met screenwriter and producer Julian Fellowes who introduced her to a casting agent who was looking for an unknown to star in Pride & Prejudice.
Less successfully, she appeared in The Greatest starring alongside Pierce Brosnan and Susan Sarandon, playing a pregnant girlfriend, but the film struggled to get a distributor.However, it was the role of 16-year-old Jenny in An Education - given to the actress when she was 22 - that got her noticed with Golden Globe, BAFTA and Oscar nominations for best actress.Subsequent appearances have included the widow of an American soldier killed in Afghanistan in the US remake of the Scandinavian drama Brothers.
For the following eight years she and her brother lived in a series of upmarket hotels and was educated at the International School of Düsseldorf in Germany before returning to the UK where she went to Woldingham School in Surrey.After an early interest in the academic side of school, Mulligan - who admits she had been quite "strait-laced" - became more interested in acting after seeing her brother perform in a school production of The King.
Her mother, who had taken her from the age of fourteen to see Broadway shows while in New York, enouraged her to study at Reading University in England.However, Mulligan claims that, before she began professionally acting, she had once "secretly" applied to and been rejected by three drama schools on her university application form.Passing up on the opportunity to go to university, she met screenwriter and producer Julian Fellowes who introduced her to a casting agent who was looking for an unknown to star in Pride & Prejudice.
Less successfully, she appeared in The Greatest starring alongside Pierce Brosnan and Susan Sarandon, playing a pregnant girlfriend, but the film struggled to get a distributor.However, it was the role of 16-year-old Jenny in An Education - given to the actress when she was 22 - that got her noticed with Golden Globe, BAFTA and Oscar nominations for best actress.Subsequent appearances have included the widow of an American soldier killed in Afghanistan in the US remake of the Scandinavian drama Brothers.