Ruth Negga Biography

Ruth Negga is the actress who was Oscar-nominated for her performance as Mildred Loving, one half of a true-life interracial couple, in the historical drama Loving.

Ruth Negga was born in Addis Ababa in 1982; her Irish mother met her father while working as a nurse in Ethiopia. The family moved to Ireland when Ruth Negga was four, and her father died in a car crash when she was just seven. She went to school in Limerick and London and then graduated from Trinity College Dublin with a degree in acting studies.

She began to take theater roles and had a few small TV parts before landing a prominent role in the Irish comedy-drama Breakfast on Pluto (2005, directed by Neil Jordan). Over the next decade she had small roles on TV and short films; in 2013 she had small parts in the apocalypse drama World War Z and the Jimi Hendrix biopic Jimi, while her modest part in the Oscar-winning 12 Years A Slave ended up on the cutting room floor.

Her relative obscurity changed with Loving, the 2016 film in which she played a black woman married to a white man, Richard Loving (played by Joel Edgerton). The film was based on the true-life couple who became the plaintiffs in Loving v. Virginia, the 1967 Supreme Court case which which ended state laws prohibiting interracial marriage.

Her work in Loving earned her both an Academy Award nomination as best actress and critical acclaim: The Daily Telegraph called her “place-your-Oscar-bets-now tremendous.” Among other awards, Negga was named the year’s best actress by the African-American Film Critics Association.