Age: 38
female
Vanessa Nuala Kirby is an English actress. She rose to international prominence with her portrayal of Princess Margaret in the Netflix drama series The Crown (2016–2017), for which she won the BAFTA for Best Supporting Actress. For her performance in the film Pieces of a Woman (2020), she won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress. She received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress. Kirby made her professional acting debut on stage, with acclaimed performances in the plays All My Sons (2010), A Midsummer Night's Dream (2010), Women Beware Women (2011), Three Sisters (2012), and as Stella Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire (2014). She also appeared in the action films Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018), Hobbs & Shaw (2019), and The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025), and portrayed Empress Joséphine in the historical drama Napoleon (2023). Description above from the Wikipedia article Vanessa Kirby, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Vanessa Kirby
Alliterative Mistress
for Alliterative Mistress in Strangers
Suggested by lindseyolson
It was a great love story, one for the ages. The speed of our beginning and the speed of our ending felt like matching bookends. They both came out of nowhere. He wanted it, he wanted me. And then he didn’t. In March 2020, Belle Burden was safe and secure with her family at their house on Martha’s Vineyard, navigating the early days of the pandemic together—building fires in the late afternoons, drinking whisky sours, making roast chicken. Then, with no warning or explanation, her husband of twenty years announced that he was leaving her. Overnight, her caring, steady partner became a man she hardly recognized. He exited his life with her like an actor shrugging off a costume. In Strangers, Burden revisits her marriage, searching for clues that her husband was not who she always thought he was. As she examines her relationship through a new lens, she reckons with her own family history and the lessons she intuited about how a woman is expected to behave in the face of betrayal. Through all of it, she is transformed. The discreet, compliant woman she once was—someone nicknamed “Belle the Good”—gives way to someone braver, someone determined to use her voice. With unflinching honesty and profound grace, Burden charts a path through heartbreak to show the power of a woman who refuses to give up on love. Strangers is a stunning, deeply moving, compulsively readable memoir heralding the arrival of a thrilling new literary talent.
