Olivia Colman may been Queen of the world after scooping her Best Actress Oscar, but she wasn’t exactly an overnight success
It’s fair to say that those who had never heard of British actress Olivia Colman have been well and truly suckered in by the disarming and charmingly awkward acceptance speech she made at this year’s Academy Awards.
The 44 year old actress scooped the Best Actress gong for her highly praised interpretation of Queen Anne, even though her highly acclaimed The Favourite failed to win any of the nine other nominations it was in the running for.
But as she revealed in her hilariously personal and kooky speech even though she appears to finally have the world in her grasp, Olivia’s career was certainly no overnight success and that in the early days of her career she had to make ends meet by working as a cleaner.
Growing up in Norwich, Colman says she halfheartedly dreamed of being an actor from a young age, describing it as “a secret dream, like talking to animals”. While she would appear in school plays, she never actually considered acting as a possible career path, which left her in a dilemma about what she actually could do in the real world, especially as academically, school was a tough place for her.
“I had to go back to school for an extra year as I did so badly in my finally exams,” the kooky actress told The Hollywood Reporter. “No uni would have me. So I went to Homerton in Cambridge [to become a teacher] but didn’t last there for very long [because] I wasn’t very good at studying.”
After she left Homerton, she stayed in Cambridge, snuck into lectures, took part in plays and realised that acting was what she wanted to do. It was there where she auditioned for acting group Footlights, where she met Robert Webb and David Mitchell for the first time, who would become an integral part of her rise.
However, after two years studying at Bristol Old Vic drama school, she discovered life as a working actor was not going to be easy.
“I worked as a temp and cleaner for quite a long time but then Lindy King from what was called PFD took me on from the show at the end of drama school so had her on my side,” Colman recalls. “She was putting me up for all sorts but I wasn’t getting any auditions.”
However, in spite of all the knock backs, she was determined to battle on. “I was never crushed [by disappointment] because I knew I couldn’t do anything else.”
Sticking to her guns, roles began to trickle in for Colman and she landed parts in the kind of dramas that fledgling actors tend to cut their teeth on, you know, like Holby.
But it was when Mitchell and Webb suggested her to the BBC for a role in Bruiser that this started to take shape.
From then on, she appeared in a series of comedic vehicles like Peep Show, Green Wing and Hot Fuzz, before dabbling in her fair share of dramatic roles, including Tyrannosaur, in which she won acclaim for playing an abused wife and The Iron Lady, in which she played Margaret Thatcher’s daughter Carol.
Her profile was significantly raised when she landed the role of DS Ellie Miller on Broadchurch for which she scooped a Best Actress BAFTA. She would go on to appear the BBC miniseries The Night Manager as a British intelligence operative for which she won a best supporting actress Golden Globe for her role.
Now she is in the process of shooting the third and fourth season of The Crown, having taken over as Queen Elizabeth from Claire Foy. Although the figure she has received for the role is unknown, she is expected to earn a lot more than the reported $40,000 that Claire Foy was paid for the title role.
You may remember that last year, controversy raged when it was revealed that Foy’s payment was way below that of her co-star Matt Smith, who played the supporting role of the Duke Of Edinburgh.
After a petition was raised to have producers of The Crown to encourage Smith and Netflix to donate part of his salary from the show to Time’s Up legal fund, show runners Suzanne Mackie and Andy Harries confirmed the pay gap and assured the incoming Sovereign that would be paid handsomely and fairly as “Nobody earns more than the Queen.”
But now with her role in The Crown and her Golden Globe and Oscar wins for The Favourite, Olivia is expected to enjoy a very fruitful career that will substantially increase her value and net worth of £2.
