Announcing... The WINNERS of the 2nd annual theFashionSpot Awards:
Designer of the YearCongratulations to ALL of our worthy winners! Thank you to our tFS forum members who voted and particupated.
If starlets are sill expected to pay their dues in Hollywood, consider British actress Ella Purnell's tab settled. To date, the 20-year-old has played a young Angelina Jolie, in 2014's Maleficent, a young Margot Robbie, in 2016's The Legend of Tarzan, and a young Keira Knightley, in 2010's Never Let Me Go. "My agents tell me I can't play the kid versions of these actors anymore, which is disappointing," Purnell says from the house she shares with her parents, in East London. "I didn't go to drama school, so I always liked saying to these incredible, successful women, 'Teach me how to be you!'"
Purnell had her first taste of leading-lady status in Tim Burton's adaption of the Y.A. novel Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, a dark fantasy about magical children. She was a fan of Burton -- who has cemented the career of more than one young girl with wide, saucer-shaped eyes like Purnell's -- from an early age. "I love movies that are super-stylistic, and I was a creepy kid, too," she laughs, referring to Burton's Edward Scissorhands. "A guy with blades as hands? That's much cooler than some prince."
This month, she stars in the play Natives, which opens at Southwark Playhouse. Her character, called "A," is a young girl who becomes obsessed with social media and defines her life by how many likes she gets on Instagram. "We all deal with this now, so the role has been super-liberating," she says. Also this year, she stars alongside Brian Cox and Miranda Richardson in Churchill, a thriller that chronicles the 24 hours leading up to D-day.
Acting started as a part-time hobby for Purnell -- she booked her first commercial, for a caramel company, at the age of nine and then took weekend classes at Sylvia Young Theatre School, in London. Now it's an actual career. "It was like I blinked and this was my life, I'm an actress now." One wonders how soon there will be up-and-coming actresses clamoring to play the younger version of her. -DEREK BLASBERG