Florence Pugh

Florence Rose Pugh, born January 3, 1996, in Oxford, England, and raised in Swindon before her family relocated to Spain, is one of the most acclaimed and exciting young actresses in both British and Hollywood cinema, a performer of extraordinary physical and emotional commitment who has already earned two Academy Award nominations and a string of performances across wildly different genres all rendered with fully inhabited naturalism. She began acting in school and local theater before making her professional debut in the ITV series Downton Abbey as a teenager. Her breakthrough came with Lady Macbeth (2016), William Oldroyd's ferocious psychological thriller in which her portrayal of a murderously wilful Victorian woman received extraordinary critical notices and announced a major new talent. She demonstrated physical fearlessness in Fighting with My Family (2019), Stephen Merchant's warmly comic biopic about WWE star Paige, in which she trained intensively in professional wrestling. Her first Academy Award nomination came for Little Women (2019), in which her portrayal of the pragmatic Amy March was so fully and humanly realized that she stole the film from its star Saoirse Ronan. She delivered one of the most talked-about performances of her generation in Ari Aster's Midsommar (2019), a horror film set in a Swedish folk cult, in which she carried an extended grief scene in a single take described by critics as one of the finest moments of acting of the decade. Subsequent acclaimed work includes Black Widow (2021) as Yelena Belova, Don't Worry Darling (2022), Oppenheimer (2023) — her second Oscar nomination — and Dune: Part Two (2024) as Princess Irulan. She is widely considered the most exciting dramatic actress of her generation working in English-language cinema.