From The Crown to Pieces of a Woman, Vanessa Kirby acts on instinct

Vanessa Kirby has made unpredictable moves since playing Princess Margaret in The Crown and is now an Oscars frontrunner.

Vanessa Kirby as Princess Margaret in the first season of The Crown.

When gorgeous, poised and deep-voiced Vanessa Kirby stood on the stage to accept her Venice film festival Volpi Cup for best actress from our own gorgeous, poised and deep-voiced jury head Cate Blanchett, it was as if the majestic Aussie was admitting the 32-year-old Brit into her elite prize-winning realm.

“I’ve looked up to you for so long and you’re one of my biggest inspirations,” Kirby told Blanchett, while thanking so many others who made her film, Pieces of a Woman, possible. Then, most poignantly, she thanked a woman called Kelly who, like the character Kirby plays, had lost her baby. Then she thanked the baby: “Luciana, you’re real too and this is your story too.”

If we thought Kirby stole the show in The Crown playing Princess Margaret in the first two seasons, Venice critics were stunned by a jaw-dropping 29 minute-childbirth scene in Pieces of a Woman. The scene may be harrowing, but Kirby presents a tour de force lesson in acting, as she does throughout the film.

She now is a frontrunner for best actress in this year’s Oscars, rivalled only, it would seem, by two-time winner Frances McDor­mand for Nomadland, which took out the Venice festival’s top prize — the Golden Lion.

Kirby, who also can cast a physical presence in action blockbusters such as Mission Impossible: Fallout and Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw — she recently has been filming a Mission Impossible sequel and there’s another in the works — honed her skills in the theatre. She won acclaim for her performance in Three Sisters in 2012 and A Streetcar Named Desire in 2014 at the Young Vic, both directed by Australia’s Benedict Andrews.

Would she like to work in Australia? “I hope so,” she enthuses. “Elizabeth Debicki is one of my best friends. We met on a movie called Everest. I was in the background, like, er, no one ever noticed me.”

Her small role in that 2015 film (which starred Australia’s Jason Clarke and Jack Gyllenhaal), and similarly small parts in Jupiter Ascending, Charlie Countryman and About Time as well as a leading role in the little-seen Queen & Country, marked the beginning of her movie career.

“If you’d asked me when I was younger and I was doing plays, if I would be doing Mission Impossible and all these other things, I never would have expected it.”

The daughter of a urologist father and a mother who edited Country Living magazine, Kirby discovered she wanted to be an actress when she 13. She was watching family friends Vanessa and Corin Redgrave playing sister and brother in the Cherry Orchard at the National Theatre.

“My mouth was wide open,” she recalls. “I just believed everything they were doing, because it was so moving and so sad. I left feeling shaken.”

Kirby in Pieces of a Woman.

After years of treading the boards she was thrilled to instil that same sense of immediacy into a film as she has done with Pieces of a Woman. It was the most profound experience of her career, she says.

Executive-produced by Martin Scorsese, Pieces of A Woman was directed by Hungary’s Kornel Mundruczo (White God) and written by his partner Kata Weber. The couple had written the story as a play based on their experience of losing a baby in a similar manner.

Kirby plays Martha, a marketing executive having a homebirth assisted by a midwife (Molly Parker). Martha’s blue-collar husband (Shia LaBeouf) is lovingly holding her hand, but when things go awry and the baby dies just after being born, they struggle to keep things together. It doesn’t help that Martha’s meddling mum (Ellen Burstyn, also an Oscar contender) can’t wait to get rid of Martha’s husband and is keen to take the case to court, with her cousin (Australian Sarah Snook) acting as the lawyer.

“I know it’s a difficult movie and is hard to watch in places and not everyone will respond to that — and that’s OK,” Kirby says.

“I think Kornel and Kata were brave to explore grief in that way. I’m so pleased that they’ve written a really complicated women’s odyssey through something extremely difficult.”

In our interview, which took place around the time of the Venice Film Festival, Kirby had commended LaBeouf for supporting her during Pieces of A Woman’s difficult emotional scenes. Yet as the film is set to release, following abuse allegations against LaBeouf by his ex-girlfriend FKA Twig, Kirby made a statement in an interview in The Sunday Times: “I stand with all survivors of abuse and respect the courage of anyone who speaks their truth. Regarding the recent news, I can’t comment on an ongoing legal case.”

To prepare for the childbirth scene Kirby watched documentaries, “anything I could find, but nothing showed it really”. Her father put her in touch with an obstetrician in a north London hospital and she was allowed to visit the labour ward. “One of the midwives said to me, ‘Are you sure you want to watch live births? It might put you off.’ But the whole experience has made me so excited for it. I now feel even more excited to do it for real.”

Kirby is single after a long relationship with Callum Turner, her co-star on John Boor­man’s so-so 2014 film Queen & Country. So, given her burgeoning career, motherhood may have to wait.

She tells the story of watching another woman giving birth: “It’s such a sacred moment and initially when they asked her, I didn’t know if she would agree — especially when they said I was an actress. But she said yes. Weirdly she was so in the moment that I don’t think she gave a shit. Afterwards when the baby was born and the midwifery team were saying they were huge fans of The Crown, she was really confused as to why Princess Margaret had watched her give birth! With all these hormones flooding through it was a surreal moment for her.”

For her blustering portrayal as Margaret, naturally blonde Kirby looked very different but sounded similar, a result of that husky voice — “it’s getting lower every day. I don’t know what to do about that!” — and indeed, conjured a vast inner strength.

“In the past women have been portrayed as weaker, the damsel who needs rescuing, or the man’s always the one going through something and the wife is there to support him. I’m excited by the idea that can be flipped.

“I’m drawn to portraying women who have extremes of feelings, whether it’s the extreme grief that Martha feels or the extreme passion that Margaret had.

“Margaret was a real livewire and had an incredible depth of feeling. I love the opportunity to step into a world which requires me to go to those places.”

As a child Kirby was bullied at school. By her own admission she was intensely sensitive. “That fragility and vulnerability has helped me so much in this job because I understand the sensitivity,” she says. “It helped me empathise with people who are going through a difficult time. As an actor it’s important not to judge.

“Some people have said that they find Martha sometimes quite unlikeable and Margaret was sometimes also unlikeable to many people. I’m drawn to those kinds of characters.”

To get into the role of Margaret she filled her home with pictures of the royal family, most prominently one in her bathroom of Margaret and Elizabeth. “I got so nervous about playing her I collected every picture I could find and somehow when I woke up or when I did a wee I could absorb her personality.”

Kirby shares her home with her younger sister and two theatre friends. Her family remains of prime importance, even in her work. “I love playing family dynamics. In The Crown it was so exciting to play two sisters. I had done it in Three Sisters and A Streetcar Named Desire and it’s so interesting how our unconscious patterns play out.”

The Crown was a game changer for Kirby and for Helena Bonham Carter, who experienced a career resurgence playing the older incarnation of Margaret — the cast change, which was always foreshadowed, was an adjustment for fans who ultimately embraced the evolution.

Since her ascent to worldwide fame Kirby has been careful to stick to her instincts.

“It’s always about exploring the next project and path of life and working with directors and actors I would love to work with,” she says. “I have been working for over 10 years, learning, really taking my time.”

Kirby co-starred with Katherine Waterston as 1850s American farmers’ wives in the engrossing lesbian romance The World to Come, directed by Mona Fastvold, which also showed at Venice last year.

“It’s about women who push the restrictions placed on them,” Kirby says.

Recently she has been cast in The Brutalist, to be directed by Fastvold’s partner Brady Corbet (the couple co-wrote the script). In an interesting development, the film stars Australian Joel Edger­ton as visionary architect Lazlo Toth in a story that focuses on his unconventional relationship with his wife Erzsebet (Marion Cotillard).

Pieces of a Woman screens on Netflix from Thursday.