Her performance won her the best actress prize in a competition at a local festival. Īrterton attended Gravesend Grammar School for Girls in Kent (now Mayfield Grammar School) and made her amateur stage debut in a production of Alan Ayckbourn's The Boy Who Fell into a Book. Her matrilineal great-grandmother was a German-Jewish concert violinist. They divorced during Arterton's early childhood, and she grew up in a council estate with her mother and younger sister, Hannah Arterton, who is also an actress. Her mother, Sally-Anne Heap, runs a cleaning business, and her father, Barry J. She played an integral role in persuading actresses to wear black at the 2018 BAFTAs in support of Time'sUp, and has been involved with ERA 50:50, an equal pay campaign in the UK, since its inception.Īrterton was born at North Kent Hospital in Gravesend with polydactyly, a condition resulting in extra fingers which a doctor removed shortly after her birth. She is also on record as being a prominent supporter of the Time's Up, ERA 50:50 and MeToo movements. She has executive-produced four feature films and two short films. Since 2016, Arterton has run her own production company, Rebel Park Productions, which focuses on creating female-led content in front of and behind the camera. She was nominated for Olivier Awards for her work on both Nell Gwynn and Made in Dagenham, and she won the Evening Standard Theatre Award for the latter. Her theatrical highlights have included starring in The Duchess of Malfi (2014), Made in Dagenham (2014), Nell Gwynn (2016) and Saint Joan (2017). She received the Harper's Bazaar Woman of the Year Award for acting in and producing The Escape.
She played Bond Girl Strawberry Fields in the James Bond film Quantum of Solace the following year, a performance which won her an Empire Award for Best Newcomer.Īrterton has since appeared in a number of blockbuster films, including Clash of the Titans (2010), Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010) and Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters (2013) as well as several smaller, arthouse pictures such as The Disappearance of Alice Creed (2009), Tamara Drewe (2010), The Escape (2017) and Vita and Virginia (2018).
She made her professional stage debut playing Rosaline in Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost at the Globe Theatre (2007), and first professionally appeared on film in the comedy St Trinian's (2007). Gemma Christina Arterton (born 2 February 1986 ) is an English actress and film producer.