Age: 43
female
Gugulethu Sophia Mbatha-Raw, MBE (/ˈɡuːɡuːəmˈbætərɔː/; born 21 April 1983) is a British actress. She began acting at the National Youth Music Theatre and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She gained acclaim for her roles as Juliet in Romeo and Juliet and Octavia in Anthony and Cleopatra in 2005 at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester. She made her West End and Broadway debut, portraying Ophelia in Hamlet in 2009. For her role as the titular character in Jessica Swale's 2015 play Nell Gwynn, she received an Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Actress nomination. Her early television roles include Doctor Who(2007), the NBC series Undercovers (2010), and FOX's Touch (2012). She had her breakthrough with the British period drama film Belle (2013), for which she won the BIFA for Best Actress. After roles in the films Beyond the Lights (2014) and Miss Sloane (2016), she co-starred in the Emmy Award-winning Black Mirror episode "San Junipero" (2016), for which she received acclaim. Her other film roles include Beauty and the Beast (2017), A Wrinkle in Time (2018), Motherless Brooklyn (2019), Misbehaviour (2020), and Summerland (2020). She has also acted in the Apple TV+ drama series The Morning Show (2019) and the Disney+ series Loki (2021–present). In 2017, Mbatha-Raw was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) by Queen Elizabeth II for services to drama. In February 2021, Mbatha-Raw was appointed a global Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Description above from the Wikipedia article Gugu Mbatha-Raw, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Vincent, having grown up as the privileged daughter of artists, has a lovely life in many ways. At forty-four, she enjoys strolling the streets of Paris and teaching at the modern art museum; she has a vibrant group of friends; and she’s even caught the eye of a young, charismatic man named Loup. But Vincent is also in Paris to escape a painful betrayal: her husband, Cillian, has published a bestselling book divulging secrets about their marriage and his own past, hinting that when he was a teenager, he may have had a child with a young woman back in Dublin—before he moved to California and never returned. Now estranged from her husband, Vincent has agreed to see Cillian again at their son’s wedding the following summer, but Loup introduces new complications. Soon they begin an intense affair, and somewhere between dinners made together, cigarettes smoked in the moonlight, hazy evenings in nightclubs, and long, starry walks along the Seine, Vincent feels herself loosening and blossoming. In a journey that is both transportive and intimate, Half-Blown Rose traverses Paris, art, travel, liminal spaces, and the messy complexities of relationships and romance, with excerpts from Cillian’s novel, playlists, and journal entries woven throughout. As Cillian does all he can to win her back, Vincent must decide what she wants . . . and who she will be.
