Felicity Jones
From 1999 to 2009 Felicity Jones played Emma Grundy in The Archers, but her film breakthrough came in Ricky Gervais’s 2010 comedy-drama Cemetery Junction.
This year, Jones, 29, is set to play the title role in The Invisible Woman, a biopic about Charles Dickens’s mistress Nelly Ternan.
‘I’d grown up listening to The Archers, so my family were very happy when I got the part. It was quite strange eating your cereal and hearing your voice come onto the radio in the kitchen. I really enjoyed doing it, and it’s really good experience as an actor to concentrate on your voice.
‘Working with Helen Mirren on The Tempest in 2010 was such an inspiration – although for the first day, I couldn’t stop thinking I should be curtsying; it’s impossible not to see her as the Queen! Once you’ve recovered from that idea, she’s very straightforward and not intimidating at all. She’s someone I’ve grown up watching, respected and admired.
‘You realise sometimes, after a shoot, that you’ve been through a near-death experience.
'Filming Cemetery Junction, I was with another actor, and we were running for a train in the scene. We had to run along the platform, then jump onto the moving carriage.
'We did this several times, and then I lost my footing. I was about to fall between the moving train and the platform when the actor next to me, Christian Cooke, swooped down and hauled me back up. The irony was, there was a poster in the station pointing out exactly this hazard!’
BEST FILM ‘Skyfall (eight Bafta nominations) was excellent, and Argo (seven nominations) was great too.’