PHOTOGRAPH MAARTEN DE BOER/CONTOUR BY GETTY IMAGES
Lily James is unreservedly cheerful and smiles so relentlessly that it’s difficult to imagine her losing the temper she says she inherited from her late father. Not that she has much reason not to be cheerful. Apart from her burgeoning career, James is madly in love with her partner of five years, actor Matt Smith, so much so that she craves some downtime with him. ‘I’d like a few months where I go travelling and just switch off. You have to trust that offers [of work] won’t go away if you stop for a bit. I haven’t really stopped,’ James revealed recently. However, her intensive schedule is reaping huge dividends. Last year, her profile received a massive boost with her appearance in the well-received Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, the follow-up to the hit 2008 original.
Now James is raising her game yet again with her performance in Yesterday, featuring a cast that includes talk show host James Corden and singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran [as themselves]. Directed by Danny Boyle (Trainspotting and Slumdog Millionaire), and with a screenplay by one of Britain’s best-loved writers, Richard Curtis, James can’t help but be thrilled. ‘There’s definitely a spirit, a humour, a comedy, a joy and a lightness to it,’ she says. ‘Richard Curtis’s script is so full of heart and characters that you fall in love with – but Danny Boyle has directed it, so there is an edge… in the way that he tells stories, moves the camera and creates a truth and rawness.’ James is the daughter of Ninette Thomson and actor, poet and musician James Thomson; she took the stage name James in her father’s honour. She studied at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London and graduated in 2010. She first gained recognition in the hit costume drama Downton Abbey as Lady Rose, before making her big-screen breakthrough as the title character in Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella in 2015.