Emily Mortimer was born in Hammersmith from Penelope Gallop and Sir John Mortimer, she studied at Saint Paul Girls’ School in London and then at Oxford and at Lincoln College, specializing in Russian literature and spending an entire year studying in Russia. After appearing in several television, stage and film productions in the late 1990s such as Notting Hill, in 2000 she joined the cast of the Shakespearean musical Love’s Labour’s Lost, directed by Kenneth Branagh.

She worked alongside Ewan McGregor in Young Adam by David Mackenzie as co-protagonist, an interpretation that will earn her fame and nominations for best actress at the Empire Awards. In 2004 she was among the protagonists of the noir Match Point, directed by Woody Allen, while in 2006 she starred in “Lars and the Real Girl” alongside Ryan Gosling and in The Pink Panther, film which also had a sequel in 2009 with The Pink Panther 2. In 2010 she began a partnership with director Martin Scorsese, who will want her among the main characters of Shutter Island and Hugo Cabret.

Emily was in the main cast of the popular TV series 30 Rock and The Newsroom. In 2014 she wrote, produced and acted together with the actress and best friend Dolly Wells and her husband Alessandro Nivola, the TV series Doll & Em, which was aired in the same year and in the following year with a second season, thanks to the great success of the first.

In 2018 she was Jane Banks in Mary Poppins directed by Rob Marshall and won the Audience Award at the Tribeca Film Festival with the film “To Dust”, while in 2003 she won the Independent Spirits Award for her performance in “Lovely & Amazing”. In 2022 she was nominated at the BAFTAs with “The Pursuit of Love”, a miniseries that Emily wrote and directed and that became one of the most successful miniseries ever for BBC.