Age: 37
female
Lily Jane Collins (born 18 March 1989) is a British and American actress and model. Born in Guildford, Surrey and raised in Los Angeles, Collins began performing on screen at the age of two in the BBC sitcom Growing Pains. In the late 2000s, Collins began acting and modelling more regularly, and she had a career breakthrough with her performance in the sports-drama film The Blind Side, which was the third highest-grossing film of 2009. She went on to appear in leading roles across feature films such as the sci-fi action-horror Priest (2011), the psychological action-thriller Abduction (2011), the fantasy Mirror Mirror (2012), the urban fantasy The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones (2013), and the independent romantic comedies Stuck in Love (2012), The English Teacher (2013), and Love, Rosie (2014). Collins was critically acclaimed for her roles as Marla Mabrey in the comedy Rules Don't Apply (2016), which earned her a nomination for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy, and for her portrayal of a young adult with anorexia in the controversial Netflix drama To the Bone (2017). She has also achieved recognition for her work in biographical films: she starred as Liz Kendall in the Netflix drama Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile (2019), as J.R.R. Tolkien's wife Edith in Tolkien (2019), and as Rita Alexander in Mank (2020), the latter of which was a critical success, earning 10 Academy Award nominations. Collins played Fantine in the BBC miniseries adaptation of Les Misérables (2018–2019), and, since 2020, she has portrayed Emily Cooper in the Netflix series Emily in Paris. For the latter, she received a nomination for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Television Series Musical or Comedy. She made her writing debut with Unfiltered: No Shame, No Regrets, Just Me (2017) in which she discussed her struggles with mental health, including an eating disorder she suffered as a teenager.
Washington, DC, 1950. Everyone keeps to themselves at Briarwood House, a down-at-the-heels all-female boardinghouse in the heart of the nation’s capital where secrets hide behind white picket fences. But when the lovely, mysterious widow Grace March moves into the attic room, she draws her oddball collection of neighbors into unlikely friendship: poised English beauty Fliss, whose facade of perfect wife and mother covers gaping inner wounds; policeman’s daughter Nora, who finds herself entangled with a shadowy gangster; frustrated baseball star Beatrice, whose career has come to an end along with the women’s baseball league of WWII; and poisonous, gung-ho Arlene, who has thrown herself into McCarthy’s Red Scare. Grace’s weekly attic-room dinner parties and window-brewed sun tea become a healing balm on all their lives, but she hides a terrible secret of her own. When a shocking act of violence tears the house apart, the Briar Club women must decide once and for all: who is the true enemy in their midst? Capturing the paranoia of the McCarthy era and evoking the changing roles for women in postwar America, The Briar Club is an intimate and thrilling novel of secrets and loyalty put to the test.
