Emily Blunt beat a childhood stutter by speaking in other people's voices
Between the ages of seven and fourteen, Emily Blunt's stutter was so severe she called it an imposter living in her body. A teacher nudged her into school plays, where putting on a character's voice let her talk fluently. That trick opened the door to a career that reached an Oscar nomination for Oppenheimer.
Blunt was born in London on 23 February 1983, the second of four children of a barrister and an English teacher who had given up acting. A shy child who avoided speaking, she spent her time watching people, inventing elaborate games and playing the cello. The stutter mostly faded in adulthood, though stress can still bring it back, and since 2006 she has worked with the American Institute for Stuttering, sitting on its board and hosting a gala that funds speech therapy scholarships.
Her route in was quick once it began. An agent spotted her in a school production at the Edinburgh Festival, and at 18, in November 2001, she debuted in the West End in Peter Hall's staging of The Royal Family, playing the granddaughter of Judi Dench's character. The Evening Standard named her best newcomer. Her first feature, Pawel Pawlikowski's heavily improvised My Summer of Love in 2004, gave her a taste for what she called the feeling of terror and excitement, and she says she has chased it ever since.
The international breakthrough came in 2006. As Emily Charlton, Miranda Priestly's harried senior assistant in The Devil Wears Prada, she stole scenes in a film that grossed 326 million dollars, and Meryl Streep called her perhaps the best young actress she had worked with. The same year she won a Golden Globe for the television drama Gideon's Daughter. There was a catch to that success: when Marvel offered her Black Widow for Iron Man 2, 20th Century Fox used an option from her Prada contract to put her in Gulliver's Travels instead.
She went on to play the young Queen Victoria, an FBI agent in Sicario and a mother fighting to survive in A Quiet Place, directed by her husband John Krasinski, which won her an Actor Award. Her turn as Katherine Oppenheimer in Christopher Nolan's 2023 film brought her Academy Award nomination, and Forbes listed her among the world's highest-paid actresses in 2020.
Source: Emily Blunt
