Daisy Ridley Biography
Daisy Ridley was a little-known 21-year-old actress when she landed the career-making role of Rey, the plucky heroine of the 2015 film Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
Daisy Ridley was born in London and graduated from the upscale Tring Park School for the Performing Arts in 2010. She went straight into acting, and over the next four years was cast in a variety of guest shots in British TV series like Youngers, Mr. Selfridge and Silent Witness.
That all changed in early 2014, when she was unexpectedly chosen by director J.J. Abrams for a leading role in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Ridley’s character, Rey, is an equipment scavenger on a desert planet who gets swept up in the battle between the nefarious First Order and the heroic Resistance. The much-anticipated film was the first Star Wars movie to be made since George Lucas sold Lucasfilm to the Walt Disney Company in 2012, and it was a smash hit, earning more than $2 billion worldwide in its first two months of release.
Ridley is expected to appear in sequels, including Star Wars VIII in 2017.
Extra credit
Daisy Ridley is 5’7” tall (170 centimeters) and has hazel eyes, according to the talent sheet from her former agency, Jonathan Arun. (After her Star Wars breakthrough she signed with the Creative Artists Agency.) The same sheet called her “highly skilled” at tap dancing, jazz dancing, and swimming… Her great-uncle Arnold Ridley was a playwright and actor who starred (as mild-mannered Private Godfrey) in the popular BBC TV series Dad’s Army in the 1970s… Her sister, Kika-Rose Ridley, is a model… Daisy Ridley has a tattoo of three stars on the top of her left foot. She told Pop Sugar in 2015 that the tattoos are not a nod to Star Wars; she got them when she was 15.
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Something in Common with Daisy Ridley
- Actors born in England (140)