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Portrait of Emerald Fennell

Film · British & Irish

Emerald Fennell

born 1985 · British

Contemporary British provocation — candy-coloured cruelty

Emerald Fennell arrived as an actress and novelist, ran the second series of a hit assassin thriller, and then made a debut feature that won her the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and made her the first British woman nominated for Best Director. Her films look like confectionery and behave like a trap: pastel palettes, pop needle-drops and a camera that dares the audience to keep enjoying itself. She is among the most argued-about directors working in Britain.

How to spot them

  • ▸Sweetshop colour — pinks, sherbet lighting, glitter — over sexual violence, class predation and revenge
  • ▸Pop songs deployed ironically at the worst possible moment
  • ▸An audience implicated in its own enjoyment; endings designed to divide a room
  • ▸Carey Mulligan, Barry Keoghan, Jacob Elordi, Rosamund Pike; cinematographer Linus Sandgren on the later films
  • ▸She writes as well as directs, and came to film from acting and from writing novels

Key films

A couture-obsessed assassin and the intelligence officer fixated on her; she took over as head writer for the second run (2019)

Killing Eve, series two — her first job as a showrunner, inherited from Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

A medical-school dropout feigns blackout drunkenness in bars each week to teach 'nice guys' a lesson (2020)

Promising Young Woman — Carey Mulligan as Cassie; the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.

An Oxford scholarship student is invited to a friend's enormous country house for the summer of 2006 (2023)

Saltburn — Barry Keoghan and Jacob Elordi, shot at Drayton House in Northamptonshire.

A 2026 adaptation of a moorland romance, all heaving bodices and sherbet colour, that critics tore apart (2026)

Wuthering Heights — Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, released in February 2026.

Key ideas

  • Complicity: the viewer is made to enjoy something and then handed the bill
  • Genre pastiche — the rom-com, the country-house novel, the revenge thriller — turned inside out
  • Class and beauty as weapons rather than decoration

Quick-fire facts

  • •Born in London on 1 October 1985, the daughter of the jewellery designer Theo Fennell
  • •She read English at Greyfriars Hall, Oxford, and published two young-adult novels and a children's book before directing
  • •As an actress she played the midwife Patsy Mount in Call the Midwife and Camilla Parker Bowles in the third and fourth series of The Crown
  • •She was head writer and showrunner of the second series of Killing Eve (2019)
  • •Promising Young Woman (2020) won her the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and the BAFTA for Outstanding British Film
  • •She was the first British woman ever nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director
  • •Saltburn (2023) was shot at Drayton House in Northamptonshire and became a streaming phenomenon
  • •Her Wuthering Heights opened in February 2026 to sharply divided and largely hostile reviews
  • •She curated a 'Love Stories' season for BFI IMAX alongside that film's release

Drill it — 7 cards

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Sources