Lena Headey Biography
Born: 1976
One of the latest in an illustrious line of British actresses to graduate from the English Rose School of Acting into the realm of full-bodied contemporary roles, Lena Headey first came to the attention of audiences in 1992, when she played the younger version of Jeremy_Irons' wife in Waterland. Hailing from Yorkshire, where she was born in 1976, Headey originally intended to be a hairdresser. Fate intervened, however, when her performance in a one-off show in the company of six school friends at the National Theatre caught the interest of a casting agent, who contacted her drama teacher and subsequently cast Headey in Waterland.
Headey's turn as a sexually adventurous schoolgirl in the film led to her being cast as a sexually adventurous maid in Merchant Ivory's The Remains of the Day in 1993. More period adventure followed that same year in The_Summer_House, in which Headey played a quiet young lass being forced into a 1950s marriage with an insufferable mama's boy. After another stint as a corseted virgin in The_Jungle_Book (1994), Headey finally got to take part in the latter half of the 20th century in the BBC miniseries Loved_Up (1995), in which she played an Ecstasy-saturated raver. That same year, she took part in another BBC mini, Band of Gold, in which she further distanced herself from her period past by portraying a lesbian prostitute.
The actress returned to period drama in Marleen_Gorris' adaptation of Virginia Woolf's Mrs._Dalloway (1997), which cast her as the younger version of the title character's best friend. More contemporary work subsequently came her way in Antonia_Bird's Face (also 1997), a crime thriller in which she played the social worker girlfriend of Robert_Carlyle's political idealist-turned-gangster. She also starred in the romantic fantasy The Man with Rain in His Shoes (1998) as one of the love interests (along with Penelope_Cruz) of an out-of-work Scottish actor (Douglas_Henshall).
After supporting turns in the lavish made-for-TV Merlin (1998) and Onegin (1999), the latter of which featured her as Liv_Tyler's sister, Headey crossed over into the realm of Hollywood teen-oriented offerings with Gossip (2000), a college-set drama that cast her as one of three students who start a nasty rumor about two of their classmates (Kate_Hudson and Joshua_Jackson). Although the film was a bomb, Headey's career looked bright with a number of projects on the horizon. Included amongst them was Aberdeen (2000), a road movie set in Norway and Scotland that also starred Ian_Hart, Charlotte_Rampling, and Stellan_Skarsgård. Rebecca Flint Marx, Rovi
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